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ESSAYS 



R. W. EMERSON, 

OF CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS. 



/ $ h * * 

Wiitii preface 

By THOMAS CARLYLE. 



LONDON : 
JOHN CHAPMAN, 142, STRAND, 

M.DCCCLTTI. 



?5 Ut 



LONDON : 
WOODPAtL AND KINDER, 

ANCEL COURT, SKINNER STREET. 



fXU 



PREFACE 



THE ENGLISH EDITOR. 



To the great reading public entering Mr. Eraser's and other 
shops in quest of daily provender, it may be as well to state, on 
t le very threshold, that this little reprint of an American Book 
of Essays is in no wise the thing suited for them ; that not the 
great reading public, but only the small thinking public, and 
peii ps only a portion of these, have any question to ask con- 
ce 1 t it. Xo editor or reprinter can expect such a book ever 
to Occome popular here. But, thank heaven, the small thinking 
public has now also a visible existence among us, is visibly en- 
larging itself. At the present time it can be predicted, what 
some years ago it could not be, that a certain number of human 
creatures will be found extant in England to whom the words of 
a man speaking from the heart of him, in what fashion soever, 
under what obstructions soever, will be welcome; — welcome, 
perhaps, as a brother's voice, to i: wanderers in the labyrinthic 
night !" Tor these, and not for any other class of persons, is 
this little book reprinted and recommended. Let such read, 
and try ; ascertain for themselves, whether this is a kind of arti- 
culate human voice speaking words, or only another of the 
thousand thousand ventriloquisms, mimetic echoes, hysteric 
shrieks, hollow laughters, and mere Particulate mechanical bab- 
blements, the soul-confusing din of which already fills all 
places? I will not anticipate their verdict; but I reckon it 



IV EDITOR S PREFACE. 

safe enough, and even a kind of duty in these circumstances, to 
invite them to try. 

The name of Ealph Waldo Emerson is not entirely new in 
England : distinguished travellers bring us tidings of such a 
man; fractions of his writings have found their way into the 
hands of the curious here ; fitful hints that there is, in New 
England, some spiritual notability, called Emerson, glide through 
Eeviews and Magazines. Whether these hints were true, or not 
true, readers are now to judge for themselves a little better. 

Emerson's writings and speakings amount to something : — 
and yet hitherto, as seems to me, this Emerson is, perhaps, far 
less notable for what he has spoken or done, than for the many 
things he has not spoken and has forborne to do. With un- 
common interest I have learned that this, and in such a never- 
resting locomotive country too, is one of those rare men who 
have withal the invaluable talent of sitting still! That an 
educated man of good gifts and opportunities, after looking at 
the public arena, and even trying not with ill success, what its 
tasks and its prizes might amount to, should retire for long years 
into rustic obscurity; and, amid the all-pervading jingle of 
dollars, and loud chaffering of ambitions and promotions, 
should quietly, with cheerful deliberateness, sit down to spend 
his life, not in Mammon-worship, or the hunt for reputation, 
influence, place, or any outward advantage whatsoever: this, 
when we get notice of it, is a thing really worth noting. As 
Paul Louis Courrier said : " Ce qui me distingue de tous mes con- 
temporains c'est que je nai pas la pretention d'etre roi." " All 
my contemporaries;" — poor contemporaries! It is as if the 
man said, Yes, ye contemporaries, be it known to you, or let it 
remain unknown, there is one man who does not need to be 
a king ; king neither of nations, nor of parishes or cliques, nor 
even of cent-per-annums ; nor, indeed, of anything at all, save of 
himself only. " Eealities ? " Yes, your dollars are real, your 
cotton and molasses are real ; so are Presidentships, Senator- 
ships, celebrations, reputations, and the wealth of Eothschild : 
but to me, on the whole, they are not the reality that will 
suffice. To me, without some other reality, they are mockery, 
and amount to zero, nay, to a negative quantity. Eterntttes 



EDITOR S PREFACE. 

surround this god-given life of mine : what will all the dollar? 
in creation do for me? Dollars, dignities, senate-addresses. 
review-articles, gilt coaches, or cavalcades, with world-wide 
huzzaings and parti-coloured beef-eaters, never so many : 
heaven, what were all these? Behold, ye shall have all these, 
and I will endeavour for a thing other than these. Behold, we 
will entirely agree to differ in this matter: I to be in your eyes 
nothing:, you to be something, to be much, to be all things : — 
wherefore, adieu in God's name: go ye that way^I go this ! — 
Pitv that a man, for such cause, should be so distinguished from 
oil his contemporaries ! It is a misfortune partly of these our 
peculiar times. Times and nations of any strength have always 
privately held in them many such men. Times and nations that 
hold none, or few, of such, may indeed seem to themselves 
strong and great, but are only bulky, loud : no heart or solidity 
in them ; — great, as the blown bladder is, which by and by will 
collapse and become small enough ! 

Tor myself, I have looked over with no common feeling to 
this brave Emerson, seated by his rustic hearth, on the other 
side of the Ocean (vet not altogether parted from me, either), 
silently communing with his own soul, and with the God's world 
it finds itself alive in yonder. Pleasures of Virtue, Progress of 
the Species, Black Emancipation. Xew Tariff, Eclecticism, Loco- 
focoism, ghost of improved Socinianism : these, with many 
other ghosts and substances, are squeaking, jabbering, accord- 
ing to their capabilities, round this man : to one man among the 
sixteen millions their jabber is all unmusical. The silent voices 
of the stars above, and of the green earth beneath, are pro- 
rit abler to him, — tell him gradually that these others are but 
ghosts, which will shortly have to vanish ; that the life-fountain 
these proceeded out of does not vanish ! The words of such a 
man, what words he finds good to speak, are worth attend- 
ing to. By degrees, a small circle of living souls, ea°'er to 
hear, is gathered. The silence of this man has to become 
speech : may this, too, in its due season, prosper for him ! 
Emerson has gone to lecture, various times, to special audiences, 
in Boston, and occasionally elsewhere. Three of those Lec- 
tures, already printed, are known to some here : as is the little 



VI EDITOR S PREFACE. 



pamphlet called Nature, of somewhat earlier date. It may be 
said, a great meaning lies in these pieces, which as yet finds no 
adequate expression for itself. A noteworthy, though very un- 
attractive work, moreover, is that new periodical they call The 
Dial, in which he occasionally writes, which appears, indeed, 
generally to be imbued with his way of thinking, and to proceed 
from the circle that learns of him. This present little volume 
of Essays, printed in Boston a few months ago, is Emerson's 
first book. ^1 unpretending little book, composed, probably, 
in good part, irom mere lectures which already lay written. It 
affords us, on several sides, in such manner as it can, a direct 
glimpse into the man, and that spiritual world of his. 

Emerson, I understand, was bred to Theology ; of which 
primary bent his latest way of thought still bears traces. In a 
very enigmatic way, we hear much of " the universal soul, 55 of 
the &c, &c. : flickering like bright bodiless northern streamers, 
notions and half-notions of a metaphysic, theosophic, theologic 
kind are seldom long wanting in these Essays. I do not advise 
the British public to trouble itself much with all that ; still less, 
to take offence at it. Whether this Emerson be " a Pantheist, 55 
or what kind of Theist or 1st he may be, can perhaps as well 
remain undecided. If he prove a devout-minded, veritable, 
original man, this, for the present, will suffice. Ists and Isms 
are rather growing a weariness. Such a man does not readily 
range himself under Isms. A man to whom the " open secret 
of the universe 5 ' is no longer a closed one, what can his speech 
of it be in these days ? All human speech, in the best days, all 
human thought that can or could articulate itself in reference to 
such things, what is it but the eager stammering and struggling 
as of a wondering infant, — in view of the Unnameable ! That 
this little book has no " system, 55 and points or stretches far 
beyond all systems, is one of its merits. We will call it the 
soliloquy of a true soul, alone under the stars, in this day. In 
England, as elsewhere, the voice of a true soul, any voice of 
such may be welcome to some. Eor in England, as elsewhere, 
old dialects and formulas are mostly lying dead ; some dim sus- 
picion, or clear knowledge, indicates on all hands that they are 
as good as dead ; and how can the skilfullest galvanizing make 



EDITOR. S PREFACE. Vll 

them any more live ? For they are dead : and their galvanic 
motions, O heavens, are not of a pleasant sort ! That one man 
more, in the most modern dialect of this year 1841, recognizes 
the oldest everlasting truths : here is a thing worth seeing, 
among the others. One man more who knows, and believes of 
very certainty, that man's soul is still alive, that God's universe 
is still godlike, that of all ages of miracles ever seen, or dreamt 
of, by far the most miraculous is this age in this hour ; and who, 
with all these devout beliefs, has dared, like a valiant man, to 
bid chimeras, " Be chimerical ; disappear, and let us have an end 
of you!" — is not this worth something? In a word, while so 
many Benthamisms, Socialisms, Fourrierisms, professing to have 
no soul, go staggering and lowing like monstrous mooncalves, 
the product of a heavy-laden moonstruck age ; and, in this same 
baleful " twelfth hour of the night," even galvanic Puseyisms, as 
we say, are visible, and dancings of the sheeted dead, — shall not 
any voice of a living man be welcome to us, even because it is 
alive ? 

For the rest, what degree of mere literary talent lies in these 
utterances, is but a secondary question, which every reader may 
gradually answer for himself. What Emerson's talent is, we 
will not altogether estimate by this book. The utterance is 
abrupt, fitful ; the great idea not yet embodied struggles towards 
an embodiment. Yet everywhere there is the true heart of a 
man ; which is the parent of all talent ; which without much 
talent cannot exist. A breath as of the green country,— all the 
welcomer that it is iVe^-England country, not second-hand, but 
first-hand country, — meets us wholesomely everywhere in these 
Essays ; the authentic green earth is there, with her mountains, 
rivers, with her mills and farms. Sharp gleams of insight arrest 
us by their pure intellectuality ; here and there, in heroic rusti- 
cism, a tone of modest manfulness, of mild invincibility, low- 
voiced, but lion-strong, makes us too thrill with a noble pride. 
Talent? Such ideas as dwell in this man, how can they ever 
speak themselves with enough of talent ? The talent is not the 
chief question here. The idea, that is the chief question. Of 
the living acorn you do not ask first, How large an acorn art 
thou ? The smallest living acorn is fit to be the parent of oak- 



Vlll EDITOH S PUEFACE. 

trees without end,— could clothe all New England with oak- 
trees by and by. You ask it, first of all : Art thou a living 
acorn ? Certain, now, that thou art not a dead mushroom, as 
the most are ? — 

But, on the whole, our book is short : the Preface should not 
grow too long. Closing these questionable parables and inti- 
mations, let me, in plain English, recommend this little book as 
the book of an original veridical man, worthy the acquaintance 
of those who delight in such ; and so ; Welcome to it whom it 
may concern ! 

T. CARLYLE. 

London, 1\th August, 1841. 



CONTENTS. 











PAGE 


I. — HISTORY 










. 1 


II. — SELF-RELIANCE 










. 19 


III. COMPENSATION 










. 43; 


IT. SPIRITUAL LAWS 










. 63 


V. — LOVE 










. 83 


VI. FRIENDSHIP . 










. 95 


Yi]L PRUDENCE 










. Ill 


YIII. HEROISM 










. 123 


IX. THE OVER- SOUL 










. 135 


X. CIRCLES 










. 153 


XI. INTELLECT . 










. 107 


XII. ART - 


■ 








. 181 



HISTORY. 



There is no great and no small 
To the soul that maketh all : 
And where it cometh ail things are;. 
And it cometh every where. 



I am owner of the sphere, 

Of the seven stars, and the solar year, 

Of Caesar's hand and Plato's brain, 

Of Lord Christ's heart and Shakspere's strain. 



ESSAY I. 

HISTOKY. 



There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man 
is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once 
admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole 
estate. What Plato has thought, he may think ; what a saint 
has felt, he may feel ; what at any time has befallen any man, 
he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind, 
is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and 
sovereign agent. 

Of the works of this mind history is the record. Its genius 
is illustrated by the entire series of days. Man is explicable by 
nothing less than all his history. Without hurry, without rest, 
the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every 
faculty, every thought, every emotion, which belongs to it in 
appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact ; 
all the facts of history pre-exist in the mind as laws. Each law 
in turn is made by circumstances predominant, and the limits of 
nature give power to but one at a time. A man is the whole 
encyclopaedia of facts. The creation of a thousand forests is in 
one acorn, and Egypt, Greece, Rome, Gaul, Britain, America, lie 
folded already in the first man. Epoch after epoch, camp, king- 
dom, empire, republic, democracy, are merely the application of 
his manifold spirit to the manifold world. 

This human mind wrote history and this must read it. The 
Sphinx must solve her own riddle. If the whole of history is 
in one man, it is all to be explained from individual experience. 
There is a relation between the hours of our life and the centuries 
of time. As the air I breathe is drawn from the great repo- 
sitories of nature, as the light on my book is yielded by a star 
a hundred millions of miles distant, as the poise of my body 

B 



Z ESSAY I. 

depends on the equilibrium of centrifugal and centripetal forces, 
so the hours should be instructed by the ages, and the ages ex- 
plained by the hours. Of the universal mind each individual 
man is one more incarnation. All its properties consist in him. 
Each new fact in his private experience flashes a light on what 
great bodies of men have done, and the crises of his life refer to 
national crises. Every revolution was first a thought in one man's 
mind, and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is 
the key to that era. Every reform was once a private opinion, 
and when it shall be a private opinion again, it will solve the 
problem of the age. The fact narrated must correspond to some- 
thing in me, to be credible or intelligible. We as we read must 
become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and 
executioner, must fasten these images to some reality in our 
secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly. What befell 
Asdrubal or Caesar Borgia, is as much an illustration of the 
mind's powers and depravations as what has befallen us. Each 
new law and political movement has meaning for you. Stand 
before each of its tablets and say, "under this mask, did my 
Proteus nature hide itself." This remedies the defect of our 
too great nearness to ourselves. This throws our own actions 
into perspective : and as crabs, goats, scorpions, the balance and 
the waterpot, lose their meanness when hung as signs in the 
zodiac, so I can see my own vices without heat in the distant 
persons of Solomon, Alcibiades, and Catiline. 

It is the universal nature which gives worth to particular men 
and things. Human life as containing this is mysterious and 
inviolable, and we hedge it round with penalties and laws. All 
laws derive hence their ultimate reason, all express more or less 
distinctly some command of this supreme illimitable essence. 
Property also holds of the soul, covers great spiritual facts, and 
instinctively we at first hold to it with swords and laws, and 
wide and complex combinations. The obscure consciousness of 
this fact is the light of all our day, the claim of claims ; the plea 
for education, for justice, for charity, the foundation of friend- 
ship and love, and of the heroism and grandeur which belong 
to acts of self-reliance. It is remarkable that involuntarily we 
always read as superior beings. Universal history, the poets, 
the romancers, do not in their stateliest pictures, — in the sacer- 
dotal, the imperial palaces, in the triumphs of will, or of genius, 
anywhere lose our ear, anywhere make us feel that we intrude, 
that this is for better men, but rather is it true that, in their 
grandest strokes, there we feel most at home. All that Shak- 
speare says of the king, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the 



HISTORY. 6 

corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathise in the great 
moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resist- 
ances, the great prosperities of men ; because then law was en- 
acted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow 
was struck for us as we ourselves in that place would have done 
or applauded. 

We have the same interest in condition and character. We 
honour the rich because they have externally the freedom, power, 
and grace which we feel to be proper to man, proper to us. So 
all that is said of the wise man by stoic or oriental or modern 
essayist, describes to each reader his own idea, describes his 
unattained but attainable self. All literature writes the character 
of the wise man. Books, monuments, pictures, conversation, 
are portraits in which he finds the lineaments he is forming. 
The silent and the eloquent praise him, and accost him, and 
he is stimulated wherever he moves as by personal allusions. 
A true aspirant, therefore, never needs look for allusions per- 
sonal and laudatory in discourse. He hears the commendation, 
not of himself, but more sweet, of that character he seeks, in 
every word that is said concerning character, yea, further, in 
every fact and circumstance that befalls — in the running river, 
and the rustling corn. Praise is looked, homage tendered, love 
flows from mute nature, from the mountains and the lights of 
the firmament. 

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us 
use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and 
not passively ; to esteem his own life the text, and books the 
commentary. Thus compelled, the muse of history will utter 
oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I 
have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who 
thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names 
have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing 
to-day. 

The world exists for the education of each man. There is 
no age or state of society or mode of action in history, to which 
there is not somewhat corresponding in his life. Everything 
tends in a most wonderful manner to abbreviate itself and yield 
its own virtue to him. He should see that he can live all history 
in his own person. He must sit solidly at home with might and 
main, and not suffer himself to be bullied by kings or empires, 
but know that he is greater than all the geography and all the 
government of the world ; he must transfer the point of view from 
which history is commonly read, from Eome and Athens and 
London to himself, and not deny his conviction that he is the 

b 2 



4 ESSAY I. 

Court, and if England or Egypt have anything to say to him, he 
will try the case ; if not, let them for ever be silent. He must 
attain and maintain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret 
sense, and poetry and annals are alike. The instinct of the 
mind,' the purpose of nature betrays itself in the use we make of 
the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to shining 
ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no 
fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Pales- 
tine, and even early Eome are passing already into fiction. The 
Garden of Eden, the Sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry 
thenceforward to all nations. Who cares what the fact was, 
when we have made a constellation of it to hang in heaven an 
immortal sign ? London and Paris and New York must go the 
same way. "What is History," said Napoleon, " but a fable 
agreed upon ? " This life of ours is stuck round with Egypt, 
Greece, Gaul, England, War, Colonisation, Church, Court and 
Commerce, as with so many flowers and wild ornaments grave 
and gay. I will not make more account of them. I believe 
in Eternity. I can find Greece, Asia, Italy, Spain, and the 
Islands, — the genius and creative principle of each and of all 
eras, in my mind. 

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts that have 
moved us in history in our private experience, and verifying them 
here. All history becomes subjective ; in other words, there is 
properly no History; only Biography. Every mind must know 
the whole lesson for itself — must go over. the whole ground. 
What it does not see, what is does not live, it will not know. 
What the former age has epitomised into a formula or rule for 
manipular convenience, it will lose all the good of verifying for 
itself, by means of the wall of that rule. Somewhere, some 
time, it will demand and find compensation for that loss by doing 
the work itself. Eerguson discovered many things in astronomy 
which had long been known. The better for him. 

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the 
state enacts, indicates a fact in human nature ; that is all. We 
must in our selves see the necessary reason of every fact, — 
see how it could and must be. So stand before every public and 
every private work ; before an oration of Burke, before a victory 
of Napoleon, before a martyrdom of Sir Thomas More, of Sidney, 
of Marmaduke Robinson, before a Erench Keign of Terror, and 
a Salem hanging of witches, before a fanatic Revival, and the 
Animal Magnetism in Paris, or in Providence. We assume that 
we, under like influence, should be alike affected, and should 
achieve the like ; and we aim to master intellectually the steps, 



HISTORY. 



aiid reach the same height or the same degradation that our 
fellow, our proxy has done. 

All inquiry into antiquity, — all curiosity respecting the pyra- 
mids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, 
Memphis, is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and pre- 
posterous There or Then, and introduce in its place the Here and 
the Now. Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and 
pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference 
between the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied 
himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a 
person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which 
he himself should also have worked, the problem is then solved ; 
his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes 
and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and 
they live again to the mind, or are now. 

A Gothic cathedral affirms that it was done by us, and not 
done by us. Surely it was by man, but we find it not in our 
man. But we apply ourselves to the history of its production. 
We put ourselves into the place and historical state of the builder. 
"We remember the forest dwellers, the first temples, the adherence 
to the first type, and the decoration of it as the wealth of the 
nation increased ; the value which is given to wood by carving 
led to the carving over the whole mountain of stone of a cathe- 
dral. TVhen we have gone through this process, and added 
thereto the Catholic Church, its cross, its music, its processions, 
its saints' days and image worship, we have, as it were, been 
the man that made the minster; we have seen how it could 
and must be. We have the sufficient reason. 

The difference between men is in their principle of association. 
Some men classify objects by colour and size and other accidents 
of appearance; others by intrinsic likeness, or by the relation 
of cause and effect. The progress of the intellect is to the 
clearer vision of causes, which neglects surface differences. To 
the poet, to the philosopher, to the saint, all things are friendly 
and sacred, all events profitable, all days holy, all men divine. 
For the eye is fastened on the life, and slights the circumstance. 
Every chemical substance, every plant, every animal in its growth, 
teaches the unity of cause, the variety of appearance. 

Upborne and surrounded as we are by this all-creating nature, 
soft and fluid as a cloud or the air, should we be such hard 
pedants, and magnify a few forms '? Why should we make ac- 
count of time, or of magnitude, or of figure r The soul knows 
them not, and genius, obeying its law, knows how to play with 
them as a young child plays with graybeards and in churches. 



6 ESSAY I. 

Genius studies the causal thought, and, far back in the womb of 
things, sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge ere they 
fall by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad through 
all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. 
Genius detects through the fly, through the caterpillar, through 
the grub, through the egg, the constant individual; through 
countless individuals the fixed species; through many species 
the genus ; through all genera the steadfast type ; through 
all the kingdoms of organized life the eternal unity. Nature 
is a mutable cloud, which is always and never the same. She 
casts the same thought into troops of forms, as a poet makes 
twenty fables with one moral. Through the bruteness and tough- 
ness of matter a subtle spirit bends all things to its own end. 
JThe adamant streams into softest but precise form before it, 
and, whilst I look at it, its outline and texture are changed 
again. Nothing is so fleeting as form. Yet never does it quite 
deny itself. In man we still trace the remains or hints of all 
that we esteem badges of servitude in the lower races, yet in 
him they enhance his nobleness and grace ; as Io, in iEschylus, 
transformed to a cow, offends the imagination, but how changed 
when as Isis in Egypt she meets Osiris Jove, a beautiful woman, 
with nothing of the metamorphosis left but the lunar horns as 
the splendid ornament of her brows ! 

The identity of history is equally intrinsic, the diversity equally 
obvious. There is at the surface infinite variety of things ; at 
the centre there is simplicity of cause. How many are the acts 
of one man in which we recognise the same character ! Observe 
the variety of sources of our information in respect to the Greek 
genius : we have the civil history of that people, as Herodotus, 
Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch have given it — a very 
sufficient account of what manner of persons they were, and 
what they did. We have the same soul expressed for us again 
in their literature ; in epic and lyric poems, drama, and philoso- 
phy ; a very complete form. Then we have it once more in their 
architecture, — a beauty as of temperance itself, limited to the 
straight line and the square — a builded geometry. Then we 
have it once again in sculpture, — " the tongue on the balance of 
expression," — a multitude of forms in the utmost freedom of 
action and never transgressing the ideal serenity, like votaries 
performing some religious dance before the gods, and, though in 
convulsive pain or mortal combat, never daring to break the 
figure and decorum of their dance. Thus, of the genius of one 
remarkable people, we have a fourfold representation, and to 
the senses what more unlike than an ode cf Pindar, a marble 



HISTORY. 7 

Centaur, the Peristyle of the Parthenon, and the last actions of 
Phocion ? 

Every one must have observed faces and forms which, with- 
out any resembling feature, make a like impression on the be- 
holder. A particular picture or copy of verses, if it do not 
awaken the same train of images, will yet superinduce the same 
sentiment as some wild mountain walk, although the resemblance 
is nowise obvious to the senses, but is occult and out of the 
reach of the understanding. Nature is an endless combination 
and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known 
air through innumerable variations. 

Nature is full of a sublime family likeness throughout her works, 
and delights in startling us with resemblances in the most un- 
expected quarters. I have seen the head of an old sachem of 
the forest, which at once reminded the eye of a bald mountain 
summit, aud the furrows of the brow suggested the strata of the 
rock. There are men whose manners have the same essential 
splendour as the simple and awful sculpture on the friezes of 
the Parthenon, and the remains of the earliest Greek art. And 
there are compositions of the same strain to be found in the 
books of all ages. What is Guido's Eospigliosi Aurora but a 
morning thought, as the horses in it are only a morning cloud ? 
If any one will but take pains to observe the variety of actions 
to which he is equally inclined in certain moods of mind, and 
those to which he is averse, he will see how deep is the chain of 
affinity. 

A painter told me that nobody could draw a tree without in 
some sort becoming a tree ; or draw a child by studying the 
outlines of its form merely, — but, by watching for a time his 
motions and plays, the painter enters into his nature, and can 
then draw him at will in every attitude. So Koos " entered into 
the inmost nature of a sheep." I knew a draughtsman employed 
in a public survey, who found that he could not sketch the rocks 
until their geological structure was first explained to him. 

In a certain state of thought is the common origin of very 
diverse works. It is the spirit and not the fact that is identical. 
By a deeper apprehension and not primarily by a painful ac- 
quisition of many manual skills, the artist attains the power of 
awakening other souls to a given activity. 

It has been said that cc common souls pay with what they do ; 
nobler souls with that which they are." And why? Because 
a profound nature awakens in us by its actions and words, by 
its very looks and maimers, the same power and beauty that 
a gallery of sculpture, or of pictures, addresses. 



8 ESSAY I. 

Civil, natural history, the history of art and of literature, 
— must be explained from individual history, or must remain 
words. There is nothing but is related to us, nothing that does 
not interest us — kingdom, college, tree, horse, or iron shoe, the 
roots of all things are in man. Santa Croce and the dome of 
St. Peter's are lame copies after a divine model. Strasburg Ca- 
thedral is a material counterpart of the soul of Erwin of Stein- 
bach. The true poem is the poet's mind ; the true ship is the 
ship-builder. In the man, could we lay him open, we should 
see the sufficient reason for the last flourish and tendril of his 
work, as every spine and tint in the sea- shell pre-exist in the 
secreting organs of the fish. The whole of heraldry and of chi- 
valry is in courtesy. A man of fine manners shall pronounce 
your name with all the ornament that titles of nobility could 
ever add. 

The trivial experience of every day is always verifying some 
old prediction to us, and converting into things for us also the 
words and signs which we had heard and seen without heed. 

A lady, with whom I was riding in the forest, said to me, 
that the woods always seemed to her to wait, as if the genii who 
inhabit them suspended their deeds until the wayfarer has passed 
onward, a thought which poetry has celebrated in the dance 
of the fairies which breaks off on the approach of human feet. 
The man who has seen the rising moon break out of the 
clouds at midnight, has been present like an archangel at the 
creation of light and of the world. I remember, that one 
summer day in the field, my companion pointed out to me a 
broad cloud, which might extend a quarter of a mile parallel to 
the horizon, quite accurately in the form of a cherub as painted 
over churches, — a round block in the centre which it was easy 
to animate with eyes and mouth, supported on either side by 
wide-stretched symmetrical wings. What appears once in the 
atmosphere may appear often, and it was undoubtedly the arche- 
type of that familiar ornament. I have seen in the sky a chain 
of summer lightning, which at once showed to me that the 
Greeks drew from nature when they painted the thunderbolt in 
the hand of Jove. I have seen a snow-drift along the sides of 
the stone wall which obviously gave the idea of the common 
architectural scroll to abut a tower. 

By surrounding ourselves with the original circumstances we 
invent anew the orders and the ornaments of architecture, as we 
see how each people merely decorated its primitive abodes. The 
Doric temple preserves the semblance of the wooden cabin in 
which the Dorian dwelt. The Chinese Pagoda is plainly a 



HISTORY. 9 

Tartar tent. The Indian and Egyptian temples still betray 
the mounds and subterranean houses of their forefathers. lc The 
custom of making houses and tombs in the living rock," (says 
Heeren, in his Eesearches on the Ethiopians,) " determined very 
naturally the principal character of the Nubian-Egyptian archi- 
tecture to the colossal form which it assumed. In these caverns 
already prepared by nature, the eye was accustomed to dwell on 
huge shapes and masses, so that when art came to the assist- 
ance of nature, it could not move on a small scale without 
degrading itself. T\ nat would statues of the usual size, or neat 
porches and wings have been, associated with those gigantic 
halls before which only Colossi could sit as watchmen, or lean 
on the pillars of the interior ?" 

The Gothic church plainly originated in a rude adaptation of 
the forest trees with all their boughs to a festal or solemn arcade, 
as the bands about the cleft pillars still indicate the green withes 
that tied them. Xo one can walk in a road cut through pine 
woods, without being struck with the architectural appearance 
of the grove, especially in winter, when the barrenness of all other 
trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in a 
winter afternoon one will see as readily the origin of the stained 
glass window with which the Gothic cathedrals are adorned, in 
the colours of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing 
branches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter the 
old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals without feeling 
that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that 
his chisel, his saw, and plane, still reproduced its ferns, its spikes 
of flowers, its locust, elm, oak, fir, pine, and spruce. 

The Grothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone subdued by the 
insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite 
blooms into an eternal flower with the lightness and delicate 
finish as well as the aerial proportions and perspective of vege- 
table beauty. 

In like manner all public facts are to be individualized, all 
private facts are to be generalized. Then at once History be- 
comes fluid and true, and Biography deep and sublime. As the 
Persian imitated in the slender shafts and capitals of his archi- 
tecture the stem and flower of the lotus and palm, so the Persian 
Court in its magnificent era never gave over the Nomadism of 
its barbarous tribes, but travelled from Ecbatana, where the 
spring was spent, to Susa in summer, and to Babylon for the 
winter. 

In the early history of Asia and Africa, Nomadism and Agri- 
culture are the two antagonist facts. The geography of Asia and 

b ■ 3 



10 ESSAY I. 

of Africa necessitated a nomadic life. But the nomads were the 
terror of all those whom the soil or the advantages of a market 
had induced to build towns. Agriculture, therefore, was a reli- 
gious injunction because of the perils of the state from nomadism. 
And in these late and civil countries of England and America, 
these propensities still fight out the old battle in the nation and 
in the individual. The nomads of Africa were constrained to 
wander by the attacks of the gad-fly, which drives the cattle 
mad, and so compels the tribe to emigrate in the rainy season, 
and drive off the cattle to the higher sandy regions. The nomads 
of Asia follow the pasturage from month to month. In America 
and Europe, the nomadism is of trade and curiosity. A progress 
certainly from the gad-fly of Astaboras to the Anglo- and Italo- 
mania of Boston Bay. Sacred cities, to which a periodical religious 
pilgrimage was enjoined, or stringent laws and customs tending 
to invigorate the national bond, were the check on the old rovers 
and the cumulative values of long residence are the restraints 
on the itineracy of the present day. The antagonism of the 
two tendencies is not less active in individuals, as the love of 
adventure or the love of repose happens to predominate. The 
man of rude health and flowing spirits has the faculty of rapid 
domestication, lives in his wagon, and roams through all latitudes 
as easily as a Calmuck. At sea, or in the forest, or in the snow, 
he sleeps as warm, dines with as good appetite, and associates 
as happily, as beside his own chimneys ; or, perhaps, his facility 
is deeper seated in the increased range of his faculties of obser- 
vation, which yields him points of interest, wherever fresh objects 
meet his eyes. The pastoral nations were needy and hungry to 
desperation ; and this intellectual nomadism in its excess, bank- 
rupts the mind, through the dissipation of power on a miscel- 
lany of objects. The home-keeping wit, on the other hand, is 
that continence or content, which finds all the elements of life 
in its own soil ; and which has its own perils of monotony and 
deterioration, if not stimulated by foreign infusions. 

Everything the individual sees without him, corresponds to 
his states of mind, and everything is in turn intelligible to him, 
as his onward thinking leads him into the truth to which that 
fact or series belongs. 

The primeval world, the Eore-world, as the Germans say, — I 
can dive to it in myself as well as grope for it with researching 
fingers in catacombs, libraries, and the broken reliefs and torsos 
of ruined villas. 

What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek 
history, letters, art, and poetry, in all its periods, from the heroic 



HISTORY. 11 

or Homeric age, down to the domestic life of the Athenians and 
Spartans, four or fi\te centuries later ? What but this, that every 
man passes personally through a Grecian period. The Grecian 
state is the era of the bodily nature, the perfection of the 
senses, — of the spiritual nature unfolded in strict unity with the 
body. In it existed those human forms which supplied the 
sculptor with his models of Hercules, Phoebus, and Jove ; not 
like the forms abounding in the streets of modern cities, wherein 
the face is a confused blur of features, but composed of incor- 
rupt, sharply defined, and symmetrical features, whose eye-sockets 
are so formed, that it would be impossible for such eyes to squint, 
and take furtive glances on this side and on that, but they must 
turn the whole head. 

The manners of that period are plain and fierce. The reve- 
rence exhibited is for personal qualities, courage, address, self- 
command, justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest. 
Luxury and elegance are not known. A sparse population and 
want make every man his own valet, cook, butcher, and soldier, 
and the habit of supplying his own needs educates the body to 
wonderful performances. Such are the Agamemnon and Diomed 
of Homer, and not far different is the picture Xenophon gives of 
himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. 
" After the army had crossed the river Teleboas in Armenia, 
there fell much snow, and the troops lay miserably on the ground 
covered with it. But Xenophon arose naked, and taking an axe, 
began to split wood; whereupon others arose and did the like. 5 ' 
Throughout his army exists a boundless liberty of speech. 
They quarrel for plunder, they wrangle with the generals on 
each new order, and Xenophon is as sharp-tongued as any, and 
sharper-tongued than most, and so gives as good as he gets. 
Who does not see that this is a gang of great boys, with such 
a code of honour and such lax discipline as great boys have? 

The costly charm of the ancient tragedy, and indeed of all 
the old literature, is, that the persons speak simply, — speak as 
persons who have great good sense without knowing it, before 
yet the reflective habit has become the predominant habit of the 
mind. Our admiration of the antique is not admiration of the 
old, but of the natural. The Greeks are not reflective but per- 
fect in their senses and in their health, with the finest phy- 
sical organization in the world. Adults acted with the simplicity 
and grace of boys. They made vases, tragedies, and statues, 
such as healthy senses should — that is, in good taste. Such 
things have continued to be made in all ages, and are now, 
wherever a healthy physique exists, but, as a class, from their 



12 ESSAY I. 

superior organization, they have surpassed all. They combine 
the energy of manhood with the engaging -unconsciousness of 
childhood. The attraction of these manners is, that they belong 
to man, and are known to every man in virtue of his being once 
a child ; beside that there are always individuals who retain 
these characteristics. A person of childlike genius and inborn 
energy is still a Greek, and revives our love of the muse of 
Hellas. I admire the love of nature in the Philoctetes. But 
in reading those tine apostrophes to sleep, to the stars, rocks, 
mountains, and waves, I feel time passing away as an ebbing sea. 
I feel the eternity of man, the identity of his thought. The Greek 
had, it seems, the same fellow-beings as I. The sun and moon, 
water and fire, met his heart precisely as they meet mine. 
Then the vaunted distinction between Greek and English, be- 
tween Classic and Boniantic schools, seems superficial and 
pedantic. When a thought of Plato becomes a thought to 
me, — when a truth that fired the soul of Pindar fires mine, time 
is no more. When I feel that we two meet in a perception, that 
our two souls are tinged with the same hue, and do, as it were, 
run into one, why should I measure degrees of latitude, why- 
should I count Egyptian years ? 

The student interprets the age of chivalry by his own age of 
chivalry, and the days of maritime adventure and circumnaviga- 
tion by quite parallel miniature experiences of his own. To the 
sacred history of the world, he has the same key. When the 
voice of a prophet out of the deeps of antiquity merely echoes 
to him a sentiment of his infancy, a prayer of his youth, he 
then pierces to the truth through all the confusion of tradition 
and the caricature of institutions. 

Bare, extravagant spirits come by us at intervals, who disclose 
to us new facts in nature. I see that men of God, have, from 
time to time, walked among men, and made their commission 
felt in the heart and soul of the commonest hearer. Hence, 
evidently, the tripod, the priest, the priestess inspired by the 
divine afflatus. 

Jesus astonishes and overpowers sensual people. They can- 
not unite him to history or reconcile him with themselves. As 
they come to revere their intuitions and aspire to live holily, 
their own piety explains every fact, every word. 

How easily these old worships of Moses, of Zoroaster, of 
Menu, of Socrates, domesticate themselves in the mind ! I 
cannot find any antiquity in them. They are mine as much as 
theirs. 

Then I have seen the first monks and anchorets without cross- 



HISTORY. 13 

ing seas or centuries. More than once some individual has 
appeared to rne with such negligence of labour and such 
commanding contemplation, a haughty beneficiary, begging in 
the name of God, as made good to the nineteenth century 
Simeon the Stylite, the Thebais, and the first Capuchins. 

The priestcraft of the East and West, of the Magian, Brah- 
min, Druid, and Inca, is expounded in the individual's private 
life. The cramping influence of a hard formalist on a young 
child in repressing his spirits and courage, paralyzing the un- 
derstanding, and that without producing indignation, but only 
fear and obedience, and even much sympathy with the tyranny, 
— is a familiar fact explained to the child when he becomes a 
man, only by seeing that the oppressor of his youth is himself 
a child tyrannized over by those names, and words, and forms, 
of whose influence he was merely the organ to the youth. The 
fact teaches him how Belus was worshipped, and how the pyra- 
mids were built, better than the discovery by Champollion of 
the names of all the workmen and the cost of every tile. He 
finds Assyria and the Mounds of Cholula at his door, and him- 
self has laid the courses. 

Again, in that protest which each considerate person makes 
against the superstition of his times, he repeats step for step the 
part of old reformers, and in the search after truth finds like 
them new perils to virtue. He learns again what moral vigour 
is needed to supply the girdle of a superstition. A great licen- 
tiousness treads on the heels of a reformation. How many 
times in the history of the world has the Luther of the 
day had to lament the decay of piety in his own household ! 
"Doctor," said his wife to Martin Luther one day, " how is it 
that whilst subject to papacy, we prayed so often and with 
such fervour, whilst now we pray with the utmost coldness and 
very seldom?" 

The advancing man discovers how deep a property he hath in 
all literature, — in all fable as well as in all history. He finds 
that the poet was no odd fellow who described strange and im- 
possible situations, but that universal man wrote by his pen a 
confession true for one and true for all. His own secret biogra- 
phy he finds in lines wonderfully intelligible to him, dotted 
down before he was born. One after another he comes up in 
his private adventures with every fable of iEsop, of Homer, of 
Hafiz, of Ariosto, of Chaucer, of Scott, and verifies them with 
his own head and hands. 

The beautiful fables of the Greeks, being proper creations of 
the Imagination and not of the Fancy, are universal verities. 



14 ESSAY I. 

What a range of meanings and what perpetual pertinence has 
the story of Prometheus ! Beside its primary value as the first 
chapter of the history of Europe, (the mythology thinly veiling 
authentic facts, the invention of the mechanic arts, and the mi- 
gration of colonies,) it gives the history of religion with some 
closeness to the faith of later ages. Prometheus is the Jesus of 
the old mythology. He is the friend of man ; stands between 
the unjust "justice" of the Eternal Father, and the race of 
mortals; and readily suffers all things on their account. But 
where it departs from the Calvinistic Christianity, and exhibits 
him as the defier of Jove, it represents a state of mind which 
readily appears wherever the doctrine of Theism is taught in a 
crude, objective form, and which seems the self-defence of man 
against this untruth, namely, a discontent with the believed fact 
that a God exists, and a feeling that the obligation of reverence 
is onerous. It would steal, if it could, the fire of the Creator, 
and live apart from him, and independent of him. The Pro- 
metheus Yinctus is the romance of scepticism. Not less true 
to all time are the details of that stately apologue. Apollo 
kept the flocks of Admetus, said the poets. When the gods 
come among men, they are not known. Jesus was not ; Socrates 
and Shakspeare were not. Antaeus was suffocated by the gripe 
of Hercules, but every time he touched his mother earth, his 
strength was renewed. Man is the broken giant, and in all 
his weakness, both his body and his mind are invigorated by 
habits of conversation with nature. The power of music, the 
power of poetry to unfix, and, as it were, clap wings to solid 
nature, interprets the riddle of Orpheus, which was to his child- 
hood an idle tale. The philosophical perception of identity 
through endless mutations of form, makes him know the Proteus. 
What else am I who laughed or wept yesterday, who slept last 
night like a corpse, and this morning stood and ran ? And what 
see I on any side but the transmigrations of Proteus ? I can 
symbolise my thought by using the name of any creature, of any 
fact, because every creature is man agent, or patient. Tantalus 
is but a name for you and me. Tantalus means the impossi- 
bility of drinking the waters of thought which are always gleam- 
ing and waving within sight of the soul. The transmigration of 
souls is no fable. I would it were ; but men and women are 
only half human. Every animal of the barn-yard, the field and 
the forest, of the earth and of the waters that are under the 
earth, has contrived to get a footing and to leave the print of its 
features and form in some one or other of these upright, heaven- 
facing speakers. Ah, brother, stop the ebb of thy soul — ebbing 



HISTORY. 15 

downward into the forms into whose habits thou hast now for 
many years slid. As near and proper to us is also that old fable 
of the Sphinx, who was said to sit in the road-side and put riddles 
to every passenger. If the man could not answ T er, she swallowed 
him alive. If he could solve the riddle, the Sphinx was slain. 
T\~hat is our life but an endless flight of winged facts or events ! 
In splendid variety these changes come, all putting questions to 
the human spirit. Those men who cannot answer by a superior 
wisdom these facts or questions of time, serve them. Facts 
encumber them, tyrannise over them, and make the men of 
routine, the men of sense, in whom a literal obedience to facts 
has extinguished every spark of that light by which man is truly 
man. But if the man is true to his better instincts or senti- 
ments, and refuses the dominion of facts, as one that comes of a 
higher race, remains fast by the soul and sees the principle, then 
the facts fall aptly and supple into their plaoes \ they know their 
master, and the meanest of them glorifies him. 

See in Goethe's Helena the same desire that every word should 
be a thing. These figures he would say, these Chirons, Griffins, 
Phorkyas, Helen, and Leda, are somewhat, and do exert a spe- 
cific influence on the mind. So far then are they eternal en- 
tities, as real to-day as in the first Olympiad. Much revolving 
them, he writes out freely his humour, and gives them body to 
his own imagination. And although that poem be as vague and 
fantastic as a dream, yet is it much more attractive than the 
more regular dramatic pieces of the same author, for the reason 
that it operates a wonderful relief to the mind from the routine 
of customary images, — awakens the reader's invention and fancy 
by the wild freedom of the design, and by the unceasing suc- 
cession of brisk shocks of surprise. 

The universal nature, too strong for the petty nature of the 
bard, sits on his neck and writes through his hand; so that 
when he seems to vent a mere caprice and wild romance, the 
issue is an exact allegory. Hence Plato said that " poets utter 
great and wise things which they do not themselves under- 
stand." All the fictions of the Middle Age explain them- 
selves as a masked or frolic expression of that which in grave 
earnest the mind of that period toiled to achieve. Magic, and 
all that is ascribed to it, is a deep presentiment of the powers 
of science. The shoes of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, 
the power of understanding the voices of birds, of subduing 
the elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, are the 
obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The preterna- 



16 ESSAY I. 

tural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual youth, and the 
like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit " to bend the 
shows of things to the desires of the mind." 

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul, a garland and a rose 
bloom on the head of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow 
of the inconstant. In the story of the Boy and the Mantle, 
even a mature reader may be surprised with a glow of virtuous 
pleasure at the triumph of the gentle Grenelas ; and indeed, all 
the postulates of elfin annals, that the Fairies do not like to be 
named ; that their gifts are capricious and not to be trusted ; 
that who seeks a treasure must not speak; and the like, I 
find true in Concord, however they might be in Cornwall or 
Bretagne. 

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of 
Lammermoor. Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar 
temptation, Ravenswood Castle a tine name for proud poverty, 
and the foreign mission of state only a Bunyan disguise for 
honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that would toss 
the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and sensual. 
Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is always beau- 
tiful and always liable to calamity in this world. 

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, 
another history goes daily forward — that of the external world 
— in which he is not less strictly implicated. He is the com- 
pend of time ; he is also the correlative of nature. His power 
consists in the multitude of his affinities, in the fact that his 
life is intertwined with the whole chain of organic and inorganic 
being. In the age of the Csesars, out from the Forum at Rome 
proceeded the great highways, north, south, east, west, to the 
centre of every province of the empire, making each market- 
town of Persia, Spain, and Britain, pervious to the soldiers 
of the capital : so out of the human heart go, as it were, 
highways to the heart of every object in nature, to reduce it 
under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of relations, 
a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His 
faculties refer to natures out of him, and predict the world he is 
to inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or 
the wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot 
live without a world. Put Napoleon in an island prison, let his 
faculties find no men to act on, no Alps to climb, no stake to 
play for, and he would beat the air and appear stupid. Tran- 
sport him to large countries, dense population, complex interest, 
and antagonist power, and you shall see that the man Napoleon, 



HISTORY. 1? 

bounded, that is, by such a profile and outline, is not the virtual 
Napoleon. This is but Talbot's shadow; 

His substance is not here : 
For what you see is but the smallest part, 
And least proportion of humanity; 
But were the whole frame here, 
It is of such a spacious, lofty pitch, 
Your roof were not sufficient to contain it. 

Henry VI. 

Columbus needs a planet to shape his course upon. Xewton 
and Laplace need myriads of ages and thick-strown celestial 
areas. One may say a gravitating solar system is already pro- 
phesied in the nature of Newton's mind. Not less does the 
brain of Davy or of Gay-Lussac, from childhood exploring always 
the affinities and repulsions of particles, anticipate the laws of 
organization. Does not the eye of the human embryo predict 
the light? the ear of Handel predict the witchcraft of harmonic 
sound ? Do not the constructive ringers of "Watt, Fulton, 
"VYliitternore, Arkwright, predict the fusible, hard, and temper- 
able texture of metals, the properties of stone, water, and wood? 
Do not the lovely attributes of the maiden child predict the re- 
finements and decorations of civil society ? Here also we are 
reminded of the action of man on man. A mind might ponder 
its thought for ages, and not gain so much self-knowledge as 
the passion of love shall teach it in a day. Who knows himself 
before he has been thrilled with indignation at an outrage, or 
has heard an eloquent tongue, or has shared the throb of thou- 
sands in a national exultation or alarm ? No man can antedate 
his experience, or guess what faculty or feeling a new object 
shall unlock, any more than he can draw to-day the face of a 
person whom he shall see to-morrow for the first time. 

I will not now go behind the general statement to explore 
the reason of this correspondency. Let it suffice that in the 
light of these two facts — namely, that the mind is One; and 
that nature is its correlative — history is to be read and written. 

Thus in all ways does the soul concentrate and reproduce 
its treasures for each pupil. He, too, shall pass through the 
whole cycle of experience. He shall collect into a focus the 
rays of nature. History no longer shall be a dull book. It 
shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall 
not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the volumes 
you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you 
have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall 
walk, as the poets have described that goddess, in a robe 



18 ESSAY I. 

painted all over with wonderful events and experiences ; — his 
own form and features by their exalted intelligence shall be that 
variegated vest. I shall find in him the Fore-world ; in his child- 
hood the Age of Gold ; the Apples of Knowledge ; the Argo- 
nautic Expedition ; the calling of Abraham ; the building of the 
Temple; the Advent of Christ; Dark Ages; the Eevival of 
Letters ; the Reformation ; the discovery of new lands, the 
opening of new sciences, and new regions in man. He shall be 
the Priest of Pan, and bring with him into humble cottages the 
blessing of the morning stars and all the recorded benefits of 
heaven and earth. 

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim ? Then I reject 
all I have written, for what is the use of pretending to know 
what we know not ? But it is the fault of our rhetoric that 
we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some 
other. I hold our actual knowledge very cheap. Hear the rats 
in the wall, see the lizard on the fence, the fungus under foot, 
the lichen on the log. What do I know sympathetically, morally, 
of either of these worlds of life ? As old as the Caucasian 
man — perhaps older — these creatures have kept their council 
beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has 
passed from one to the other. What connection do the books 
show, between the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the 
historical eras? Nay, what does history yet record of the 
metaphysical annals of man? W~hat light does it shed on 
those mysteries which we hide under the names Death and 
Immortality- ? Yet every history should be written in a wisdom 
which divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts 
as symbols. I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale 
our so-called History is. How many times we must say 
Home, and Paris, and Constantinople. What does Rome know 
of rat and lizard ? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these 
neighbouring systems of being ? Nay, what food or experience 
or succour have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the 
Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter? 

Broader and deeper we must write our annals — from an ethical 
reformation, from an influx of the ever new, ever sanative con- 
science, — if we would trulier express our central and wide- 
related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and 
pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day 
exists for us, shines in on us at unawares, but the path of science 
and of letters is not the way into nature. The idiot, the Indian, 
the child, and unschooled farmer's boy, stand nearer to the light 
by which nature is to be read than the dissector or the antiquary. 



SELF-KELIAXCE. 



e 'Ne te quEesiveris extra." 



Man is his own star, arid the soul that can 
Render an honest and a perfect man, 
Commands all light, all influence, all fate, 
Xothing to him falls early or too late. 
Our acts our angels are, or good or ill, 
Our fatal shadows that walk by us still. 

Epilogue to Beaumont and Fletcher's 
Honest Mans Fortune. 



Cast the bantling on the rocks, 
Suckle him with the she-wolfs teat : 
Wintered with the hawk and fox, 
Power and speed be hands and feet. 



ESSAY IT. 

SELE-KELIA>n t CE. 



I read the other day some verses written by an eminent painter 
which were original and not conventional. The sonl always 
hears an admonition in such lines, let the subject be what it 
may. The sentiment they instil is of more value than any 
thought they may contain. To believe your own thought, to 
believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true 
for all men, — that is genius. Speak your latent conviction and it 
shall be the universal sense ; for the inmost becomes in due time 
the outmost, — and our first thought is rendered back to us by 
the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of 
the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, 
and Milton, is that they set at naught books and traditions, and 
spoke not what men, but what they thought. A man should 
learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across 
his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of 
bards and sages. Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, 
because it is his. In every work of genius we recognise our own 
rejected thoughts : they come back to us with a certain alienated 
majesty. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for 
us than this. They teach us to abide by our spontaneous im- 
pression with good-humoured inflexibility then most when the 
whole cry of voices is on the other side. Else, to-morrow a 
stranger will say with masterly good sense precisely what we 
have thought and felt all the time, and we shall be forced to 
take with shame our own opinion from another. 

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at 
the conviction that envy is ignorance ; that imitation is suicide ; 
that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion ; 



22 ESSAY II. 

that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of 
nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed 
on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power 
which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows 
what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has 
tried. Not for nothing one face, one character, one fact makes 
much impression on him, and another none. This sculpture 
in the memory is not without pre-established harmony. The 
eye was placed where one ray should fall, that it might testify 
of that particular ray. We but half express ourselves, and are 
ashamed of that divine idea which each of us represents. It may 
be safely trusted as proportionate and of good issues, so it be 
faithfully imparted, but God will not have his work made mani- 
fest by cowards. A man is relieved and gay when he has put 
his heart into his work and done his best ; but what he has said 
or done otherwise, shall give him no peace. It is a deliverance 
which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him ; 
no muse befriends ; no invention, no hope. 

- *Trust thyself : every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept 
the place the divine Providence has found for you ; the society 
of your contemporaries, the connexion of events. Great men 
have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the 
genius of their age, betraying their perception that the Absolutely 
Trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their 
hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, 
and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent 
destiny ; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not 
cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and 
benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on 
Chaos and the Dark. 

What pretty oracles nature yields us on this text in the face 
and behaviour of children, babes, and even brutes ! That divided 
and rebel mind, that distrust of a sentiment because our arith- 
metic has computed the strength and means opposed to our 
purpose, these have not. Their mind being whole, their eye is 
as yet unconquered, and when we look in their faces, we are dis- 
concerted. Infancy conforms to nobody : all conform to it, so 
that one babe commonly makes four or five out of the adults 
who prattle and play to it. So God has armed youth and pu- 
berty and manhood no less with its own piquancy and charm, 
and made it enviable and gracious, and its claims not to be put 
by, if it will stand by itself. Do not think the youth has no 
force because he cannot speak to you and me. Hark ! in the 
next room, who spoke so clear and emphatic ? It seems he 



SELF-RELIANCE. 23 

knows how to speak to his contemporaries. Bashful or bold, 
then, he will know how to make us seniors very unnecessary. 

The nonchalance of boys who are sure of a dinner, and would 
disdain as much as a lord to do or say aught to conciliate one, 
is the healthy attitude of human nature. A boy is in the parlour 
what the pit is in the playhouse; independent, irresponsible, 
looking out from his corner on such people and facts as pass 
by, he tries and sentences them on their merits, in the swift 
summary way of boys, as good, bad, interesting, silly, eloquent, 
troublesome. He cumbers himself never about consequences, 
about interests : he gives an independent, genuine verdict. You 
must court him : he does not court you. But the man is, as 
it were, clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he 
has once acted or spoken with eclat, he is a committed person, 
watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds whose affec- 
tions must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for 
this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality ! Who 
can thus avoid all pledges, and having observed, observe again 
from the same unaffected, unbiassed, unbribable, unaffrighted 
innocence, must always be formidable. He would utter opinions 
on all passing affairs, which being seen to be not private but 
necessary, would sink like darts into the ear of men, and put 
them in fear. 

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow 
faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society every- 
where is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its 
members. Society is a joint-stock company in which the mem- 
bers agree, for the better securing of his bread to each share- 
holder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The 
virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aver- 
sion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and 
customs. 

"Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. He who 
would gather immortal palms, must not be hindered by the 
name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing 
is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve 
you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world. 
I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted 
to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with 
the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have 
I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from 
within? my friend suggested — "But these impulses may be 
from below, not from above." I replied, " They do not seem 
to me to be such ; but if I am the devil's child, I will live then 



24 ESSAY II. 

from the devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my 
nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable 
to that or this ; the only right is what is after my constitution, 
the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself 
in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular 
and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we 
capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead in- 
stitutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and 
sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, 
and speak the rude truth in all ways. If malice and vanity wear 
the coat of philanthropy, shall that pass ? If an angry bigot as- 
sumes this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with 
his last news from Earbadoes, why should I not say to him, 
" Go love thy infant ; love thy wood-chopper : be good-natured 
and modest : have that grace ; and never varnish your hard, un- 
charitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk 
a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home." Rough 
and graceless would be such greeting, but truth is handsomer 
than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge 
to it — else it is none. The doctrine of hatred must be preached 
as the counteraction of the doctrine of love when that pules and 
whines. I shun father and mother and wife and 'brother, when 
my genius calls me. I would write on the lintels of the door- 
post, Whim. I hope it is somewhat better than whim at last, 
but we cannot spend the day in explanation. Expect me not to 
show cause why I seek or why I exclude company. Then, again, 
do not tell me, as a good man did to-day, of my obligation to 
put all poor men in good situations. Are they my poor ? I tell 
thee, thou foolish philanthropist, that I grudge the dollar, the 
dime, the cent I give to such men as do not belong to me and 
to whom I do not belong. There is a class of persons to whom 
by all spiritual affinity I am bought and sold ; for them I will 
go to prison, if need be ; but your miscellaneous popular cha- 
rities ; the education at college of fools ; the building of meeting- 
houses to the vain end to which many now stand ; alms to sots ; 
and the thousandfold Eelief Societies ; — though I confess with 
shame I sometimes succumb and give the dollar, it is a wicked 
dollar, which by-and-by I shall have the manhood to withhold. 
Virtues are in the popular estimate rather the exception than 
the rule. There is the man and his virtues. Men do what is 
called a good action, as some piece of courage or charity, much 
as they would pay a fine in expiation of daily non-appearance 
on parade. Their works are done as an apology or extenuation 
of their living in the world, — as invalids and the insane pay a 



SELF-RELIANCE. 25 

high board. Their virtues are penances. I do not wish to ex- 
piate, but to live. My life is for itself and not for a spectacle. 
I much prefer that it should be of a lower strain, so it be genuine 
and equal, than that it should be glittering and unsteady. I wish 
it to be sound and sweet, and not to need diet and bleeding. I 
ask primary evidence that you are a man, and refuse this appeal 
from the man to his actions. I know that for myself it makes 
no difference whether I do or forbear those actions which are 
reckoned excellent. I cannot consent to pay for a privilege 
where I have intrinsic right. Few and mean as my gifts may 
be, I actually am, and do not need for my own assurance or the 
assurance of my fellows any secondary testimony. 

What I must do, is all that concerns me, not what the people 
think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual 
life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and 
meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those 
who think they know what is your duty better than you know 
it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion ; it 
is easy in solitude to live after our own ; but the great man is 
he who, in the midst of the crowd, keeps with perfect sweetness 
the independence of solitude. 

The objection to conforming to usages that have become dead 
to you, is, that it scatters your force. It loses your time, and 
blurs the impression of your character. If you maintain a dead 
church, contribute to a dead Bible- Society, vote with a great 
party either for the government or against it, spread your table 
like base housekeepers, — under all these screens, I have difficulty 
to detect the precise man you are. And, of course, so much 
force is withdrawn from your proper life. But do your work, 
and I shall know you. Do your work, and you shall reinforce 
yourself. A man must consider what a blindrnan's-buff is this 
game of conformity. If I know your sect, I anticipate your 
argument. I hear a preacher announce for his text and topic 
the expediency of one of the institutions of his church. Do I 
not know beforehand that not possibly can he say a new and 
spontaneous word ? Do I not know that, with all this ostenta- 
tion of examining the grounds of the institution, he will do no 
such thing? Do I not know that he is pledged to himself not 
to look but at one side ; the permitted side, not as a man, but 
as a parish minister ? He is a retained attorney, and these airs 
of the bench are the emptiest affectation. Well, most men have 
bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached 
themselves to some one of these communities of opinion. This 
conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of 

c 



26 ESSAY II. 

a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every trutli is not 
quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the 
real four : so that every word they say chagrins us, and we know 
not where to begin to set them right. Meantime nature is not 
slow to equip us in the prison-uniform of the party to which we 
adhere. We come to wear one cut of face and figure, and ac- 
quire by degrees the gentlest asiuine expression. There is a 
mortifying experience in particular which does not fail to wreak 
itself also in the general history ; I mean, " the foolish face of 
piaise," the forced smile which we put on in company where we 
do not feel at ease in answer to conversation which does not in- 
terest us. The muscles, not spontaneously moved, but moved 
by a low usurping wilfulness, grow tight about the outline of 
the face, and make the most disagreeable sensation. 

For nonconformity the world whips you with its displeasure. 
And therefore a man must know how to estimate a sour face. 
The bystanders look askance on him in the public street or in 
the friend's parlour. If this aversation had its origin in con- 
tempt and resistance like his own, he might well go home with 
a sad countenance ; but the sour faces of the multitude, like 
their sweet faces, have no deep cause, — disguise no god, but are 
put on and off as the wind blows, and a newspaper directs. 
Yet is the discontent of the multitude more formidable than that 
of the senate and the college. It is easy enough for a firm man 
who knows the world to brook the rage of the cultivated classes. 

Their rage is decorous and prudent, for they are timid as being 
very vulnerable themselves. But when to their feminine rage 
the indignation of the people is added, when the ignorant and 
the poor are aroused, when the unintelligent brute force that 
lies at the bottom of society is made to growl and mow, it needs 
the habit of magnanimity and religion to treat it godlike as a 
trifle of no concernment. 

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consis- 
tency ; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of 
others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past 
acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. 

But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? 
Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory, lest 
you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public 
place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? 
It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory 
alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but bring the past 
for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a 
new day. Trust your emotion. In your metaphysics you have 



SELF-RELIANCE. 

denied pei to tile D I when the devout motions 

of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though 
should clothe God with shape and colour. Leave your theory 
seph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and fl 
A foolis is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored 

by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With colsis- 

,:eat soid has simply nothing to do. He may as * 
concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you 
think now in words as hard as cannon-balls, :. to-morrow 
speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it 
contradict everything you said to-day. "Ah, so you shall be 
lerstood." Is it so bad, then, to be misunder- 
1? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus 
and Lnth 1 opernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and e^ 

. ;- spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be 
misunderstood. 

I suppose no man can violate his nature. All the sallies of 
wfll are rounded in by the law of his being as the inequa- 
s of Andes and Himmaleh are insignificant in the curve of 
the sphere. Xor does it matter how you gauge and try him. 
. 5tei is like an acrostic or Alexandrian stanza: — read it 
forward, backward, or across, it still spells the same thing. In this 
pleasing contrite wood-life whicl _-:d allows me, let me record 
day by day my honest thought without prospect or retrospect, 
and, I cannot doubt, it will be found symmetrical, though I 
mean it not, and see it not. My book should smell of pines 
and resound with the hum of insects. The swallow vwex my 
window should interweave that thread or straw he carries in his 
bill into my web also. T\~e pass fm re arc Character 

teaches above our wills. Men imagine that they commun: 
theii virtue n vice only by overt actions, and do not see that 
virtue or vice emits a breath every moment. 

There will be an agreement in whatever variety c: actions, so 
they be each honest and natural in their hour. Tor of one will, 
the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These 
varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height 
of though:. One tendency unites them all. The voyage ;:" 
the best ship is a :._:?_ line of a hundred tacks. >ee the 
from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the 
average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself and 
will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity ex- 
plain- nothing. A:: singly, and what you have already done 
Ly 3 will jnstify you now. Greatness always appeals to the 
future. If I can be firm enough to-dav to do risrht and scorn 

c 2 



28 ESSAY II. 

eyes, I must have done so much right before, as to defend me 
now. Be it how it will, do right now. Always scorn appear- 
ances, and you always may. The force of character is cumu- 
lative. All the foregone days of virtue work their health into 
this. What makes the majesty of the heroes of the senate and 
the field, which so fills the imagination ? The consciousness of 
a train of great days and victories behind. They shed a united 
light on the advancing actor. He is attended as by a visible 
escort of angels. That is it which throws thunder into Chatham's 
voice, and dignity into Washington's port, and America into 
Adam's eye. Honour is venerable to us because it is no ephe- 
meris. It is always ancient virtue. We worship it to-day, because 
it is not of to-day. We love it and pay it homage, because it 
is not a trap for our love and homage, but is self-dependent, 
self- derived, and therefore of an old immaculate pedigree, even 
if shown in a young person. 

I hope in these days we have heard the last of conformity and 
consistency. Let the words be gazetted and ridiculous hence- 
forward. Instead of the gong for dinner, let us hear a whistle 
from the Spartan fife. Let us never bow and apologize more. 
A great man is coming to eat at my house. I do not wish to 
please him : I wish that he should wish to please me. I will 
stand here for humanity, and though I would make it kind, I 
would make it true. Let us affront and reprimand the smooth 
mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in 
the face of custom, and trade, and office, the fact which is the 
upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker 
and Actor working wherever moves a man ; that a true man 
belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. 
Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men, 
and all events. Ordinarily everybody in society reminds us of 
somewhat else or of some other person. Character, reality, 
reminds you of nothing else. It takes place of the whole 
creation. The man must be so much that he must make all 
circumstances indifferent. Every true man is a cause, a country, 
and an age ; requires infinite spaces and numbers and time fully 
to accomplish his thought ; — and posterity seem to follow his 
steps as a train of clients. A man Caesar is born, and for 
ages after we have a Roman Empire. Christ is born, and 
millions of minds so grow and cleave to his genius, that he is 
confounded with virtue and the possible of man. An institution 
is the lengthened shadow of one man ; as, the Reformation, of 
Luther; Quakerism, of Eox ; Methodism, of Wesley ; Abolition, 
of Clarkson. Scipio, Milton called the " height of Rome;" and 



SELF-RELIANCE. 29 

all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a 
few stout and earnest persons. 

Let a man then know his worth, and keep things under his 
feet. Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up and down with 
the air of a charity -boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world 
which exists for him. But the man in the street finding no 
worth in himself which corresponds to the force which built a 
tower or sculptured a marble god, feels poor when he looks on 
these. To him a palace, a statue, or a costly book, have an 
alien and forbidding air, much like a gay equipage, and seem to 
say like that, " Who are you, sir ? " Yet they are all his, 
suitors for his notice, petitioners to his faculties that they will 
come out and take possession. The picture waits for my verdict : 
it is not to command me, but I am to settle its claims to praise. 
That popular fable of the sot who was picked up dead drunk in 
the street, carried to the duke's house, washed and dressed and 
laid in the duke's bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obse- 
quious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been 
insane, — owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so 
well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but 
now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself 
a true prince. 

Our reading is mendicant and sycophantic. In history, our 
imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and 
estate, are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward 
in a small house and common day's work : but the things of 
life are the same to both : the sum total of both is the same. 
Why all this deference to Alfred, and Scanderbeg, and Gustavus ? 
Suppose they were virtuous: did they wear out virtue? As 
great a stake depends on your private act to-day, as followed 
their public and renowned steps. When private men shall act 
with original views, the lustre will be transferred from the 
actions of kings to those of gentlemen. 

The world has been instructed by its kings, who have so 
magnetized the eyes of nations. It has been taught by this 
colossal symbol the mutual reverence that is due from man to 
man. The joyful loyalty with which men have everywhere suf- 
fered the king, the noble, or the great proprietor to walk among 
them by a law of his own, make his own scale of men and 
things, and reverse theirs, pay for benefits not with money but 
with honour, and represent the law in his person, was the hiero- 
glyphic by which they obscurely signified their consciousness of 
their own right and comeliness, the right of every man. 

The magnetism which all original action exerts is explained 



30 ESSAY II. 

when we inquire the reason of self-trust. Who is the Trustee ? 
What is the aboriginal Self on which a universal reliance may 
be grounded? What is the nature and power of that science- 
baffling star, without parallax, without calculable elements, 
which shoots a ray of beauty even into trivial and impure actions, 
if the least mark of independence appear ? The inquiry leads 
us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and 
of life, which we call Spontaneity or Instinct. We denote 
this primary wisdom as Intuition, whilst all later teachings are 
tuitions. In that deep force, the last fact behind which analysis 
cannot go, all things find their common origin. For the sense 
of being which in calm hours rises, we know not how, in the 
soul, is not diverse from things, from space, from light, from 
time, from man, but one with them, and proceeds obviously from 
the same source whence their life and being also proceed. We 
first share the life by which things exist, and afterwards see 
them as appearances in nature, and forget that we have shared 
their cause. Here is the fountain of action and of thought. 
Here are the lungs of that inspiration which giveth man wisdom, 
which cannot be denied without impiety and atheism. We lie 
in the lap of immense intelligence, which makes us receivers 
of its truth and organs of its activity. When we discern justice, 
when we discern truth, we do nothing of ourselves, but allow a 
passage to its beams. If we ask whence this comes, if we seek 
to pry into the soul that causes, — all philosophy is at fault. Its 
presence or its absence is all we can affirm. Every man dis- 
criminates between the voluntary acts of his mind, and his 
involuntary perceptions, and knows that to his involuntary per- 
ceptions a perfect respect is due. He may err in the expression 
of them, but he knows that these things are so, like day and 
night, not to be disputed. My wilful actions and acquisitions 
are but roving ; — the idlest reverie, the faintest native emotion, 
command my curiosity and respect. Thoughtless people con- 
tradict as readily the statement of perceptions as of opinions, or 
rather much more readily ; for they do not distinguish between 
perception and notion. They fancy that I choose to see this or 
that thing. But perception is not whimsical, but fatal. If I 
see a trait, my children will see it after me, and in course of 
time, all mankind, — although it may chance that no one has 
seen it before me. Tor my perception of it is as much a fact 
as the sun. 

The relations of the soul to the divine spirit are so pure that 
it is profane to seek to interpose helps. It must be that when 
God speaketh, he should communicate not one thing, but all 



SELF-RELIANCE. 31 

things ; should fill the world with his voice ; should scatter forth 
light, nature, time, souls, from the centre of the present thought ; 
and new-date, and new-create the whole. Whenever a mind is 
simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, — 
means, teachers, texts, temples fall ; it lives now and absorbs 
past and future into the present hour. All things are made 
sacred by relation to it, — one as much as another. All things 
are dissolved to their centre by their cause, and in the universal 
miracle petty and particular miracles disappear. If, therefore, a 
man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you back- 
ward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in 
another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the 
acorn better than the oak which is its fulness and completion ? 
Is the parent better than the child into whom he has cast his 
ripened being '? Whence then this worship of the past ? The 
centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of 
the soul. Time and space are but physiological colours which 
the eye maketh, but the soul is light : where it is, is day ; where 
it was, is night ; and history is an impertinence and an injury, 
if it be anything more than a cheerful apologue or parable of 
mv being and becoming. 

Man is timid and apologetic. He is no longer upright. He 
dares not say " I think," " I am," but quotes some saint or 
sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing 
rose. These roses under my window make no reference to for- 
mer roses or to better ones ; they are for what they are ; they 
exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is 
simply the rose ; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. 
Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts ; in the full-blown 
flower, there is no more ; in the leafless root, there is no less. 
Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments 
alike. There is no time to it. But man postpones or remem- 
bers ; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye la- 
ments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, 
stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy 
and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above 
time. 

This should be plain enough. Yet see what strong intellects 
dare not yet hear God himself, unless he speak the phraseology 
of I know not what David, or Jeremiah, or Paul. We shall not 
always set so great a price on a few texts, on a few lives. We 
are like children who repeat by rote the sentences of grandames 
and tutors, and, as they grow older, of the men of talent and 
character they chance to see, — painfully recollecting the exact 



32 ESSAY II. 

words they spoke ; afterwards, when they come into the point of 
view which those had who uttered these sayings, they understand 
them and are willing to let the words go ; for, at any time, they 
can use words as good, when occasion comes. If we live truly, 
we shall see truly. It is as easy for the strong man to be 
strong, as it is for the weak to be weak. When we have new 
perception, we shall gladly disburthen the memory of its hoarded 
treasures as old rubbish. When a man lives with God, his 
voice shall be as sweet as the murmur of the brook and the 
rustle of the corn. 

And now at last the highest truth on this subject remains 
unsaid ; probably, cannot be said ; for all that we say is the far 
off remembering of the intuition. That thought, by what I can 
now nearest approach to say it, is this. When good is near you, 
when you have life in yourself, — it is not by any known or ac- 
customed way; you shall not discern the foot-prints of any other ; 
you shall not see the face of man ; you shall not hear any name ; — 
the way, the thought, the good shall be wholly strange and new. 
It shall exclude example and experience. You take the way from 
man, not to man. All persons that ever existed are its for- 
gotten ministers. Fear and hope are alike beneath it. There 
is somewhat low even in hope. In the hour of vision there is 
nothing that can be called gratitude nor properly joy. The soul 
raised over passion beholds identity and eternal causation, per- 
ceives the self-existence of Truth and Eight, and calms itself 
with knowing that all things go well. Vast spaces of nature ; 
the Atlantic Ocean, the South Sea ; long intervals of time, years, 
centuries, are of no account. This which I think and feel un- 
derlay that former state of life and circumstances, as it does 
underlie my present, and what is called life, and what is called 
death. 

Life only avails, not the having lived. Power ceases in the 
instant of repose ; it resides in the moment of transition from a 
past to a new state; in the shooting of the gulf; in the darting 
to an aim. This one fact the world hates, that the soul becomes ; 
for, that for ever degrades the past ; turns all riches to poverty ; 
all reputation to a shame ; confounds the saint with the rogue ; 
shoves Jesus and Judas equally aside. Why then do we prate 
of self-reliance ? Inasmuch as the soul is present, there will be 
power not confident but agent. To talk of reliance, is a poor 
external way of speaking. Speak rather of that which relies, 
because it works and is. W T ho has more obedience than I, masters 
me, though he should not raise his finger. Bound him I must 
revolve by the gravitation of spirits ; who has less 3 I rule with 



SELF-RELIANCE. 33 

like facility. We fancy it rhetoric when we speak of eminent 
virtue. We do not yet see that virtue is Height, and that a 
man or a company of men plastic and permeable to principles, 
by the law of nature must overpower and ride all cities, nations, 
kings, rich men, poets, who are not. 

This is the ultimate fact which we so quickly reach on this 
as on every topic, the resolution of all into the ever-blessed One. 
Self-existence is the attribute of the supreme cause, and it con- 
stitutes the measure of good by the degree in which it enters 
into all lower forms. All things real are so by so much of 
virtue as they contain. Commerce, husbandry, hunting, whal- 
ing, war, eloquence, personal weight, are somewhat, and engage 
my respect as examples of its presence and impure action. I see 
the same law working in nature for conservation and growth. 
Power is in nature the essential measure of right. Xature 
suffers nothing to remain in her kingdom which cannot help 
itself. The genesis and maturation of a planet, its poise and 
orbit, the bended tree recovering itself from the strong wind, the 
vital resources of every vegetable animal, are demonstrations 
of the self-sufficing, and therefore self-relying soul, All history, 
from its highest to its trivial passages, is the various record of 
this power. 

Thus all concentrates ; let us not rove ; let us sit at home 
with the cause. Let us stun and astonish the intruding rabble 
of men and books and institutions by a simple declaration of the 
divine fact. Bid the invaders take the shoes from off their feet, 
for God is here within. Let our simplicity judge them, and our 
docility to our own law demonstrate the poverty of nature and 
fortune beside our native riches. 

But now we are a mob. Man does not stand in awe of man, 
nor is his genius admonished to stay at home, to put itself in com- 
munication with the internal ocean, but it goes abroad to beg a 
cup of water of the urns of men. "We must go alone. Isolation 
must precede true society. I like the silent church before the 
service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how 
cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a pre- 
cinct or sanctuary. So let us always sit. Why should we as- 
sume the faults of our friend, or wife, or father, or child, because 
they sit around our hearth, or are said to have the same blood ? 
All men have my blood, and I have all men's. Not for that 
will I adopt their petulance or folly, even to the extent of being 
ashamed of it. But your isolation must not be mechanical, but 
spiritual, that is, must be elevation. At times the whole world 
seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles. 

c 3 



34 ESSAY II. 

Friend, client, child, sickness, fear, want, charity, all knock at 
once at thy closet door and say, c Come out unto us.' — But keep 
thy state; come not into their confusion. The power men 
possess to annoy me, I give them by a weak curiosity. No man 
can come near me but through my act. " What we love that 
we have, but by desire we bereave ourselves of the love." 

If we cannot at once rise to the sanctities of obedience and 
faith, let us at least resist our temptations, let us enter into the 
state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy 
in our Saxon breasts. This is to be done in our smooth times 
by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying- 
affection. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived 
and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, 

father, mother, wife, brother, O friend, I have lived 
with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the 
truth's. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no 
law less than the eternal law. I will have no covenants but 
proximities. I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to 
support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife, — but 
these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. 

1 appeal from your customs. 1 must be myself. I cannot 
break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me 
for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will 
still seek to deserve that you should. I must be myself. I 
will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what 
is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon 
whatever inly rejoices me, and the heart appoints. If you are 
noble, I will love you ; if you are not, I will not hurt you and 
myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in 
the same truth with me, cleave to your companions ; I will seek 
my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is 
alike your interest and mine and all men's, however long we have 
dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day ? 
You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as 
mine, and if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at 
last. — "But so you may give these friends pain." Yes, but I 
cannot sell my liberty and my power, to save their sensibility. 
Besides, all persons have their moments of reason when they 
look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they 
justify me and do the same thing. 

The populace think that your rejection of popular standards 
is a rejection of all standard, and mere antinomianism ; and the 
bold sensualist will use the name of philosophy to gild his 
crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two 



SELF-RELIANCE. 35 

confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. 
You may fulfil your round of duties by clearing yourself in the 
direct, or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied 
your relations to father, mother, cousin, neighbour, town, cat, and 
dog ; • whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also 
neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have 
my own stern claims and perfect circle. It denies the name of 
duty to many offices that are called duties. But if I can dis- 
charge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular 
code. If any one imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its 
commandment one day. 

And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast 
off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust 
himself for a task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, 
clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, 
law to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong 
as iron necessity is to others. 

If any man consider the present aspects of what is called by 
distinction society, he will see the need of these ethics. The 
sinew and heart of man seem to be drawn out, and we are 
become timorous desponding whimperers. We are afraid of 
truth, afraid of fortune, afraid of death, and afraid of each 
other. Our age yields no great and perfect persons. We want 
men and women who shall renovate life and our social state, but 
we see that most natures are insolvent : cannot satisfy their own 
wants, have an ambition out of all proportion to their practical 
force, and so do lean and beg day and night continually. Our 
housekeeping is mendicant, our arts, our occupations, our mar- 
riages, our religion we have not chosen, but society has chosen 
for us. We are parlour soldiers. The rugged battle of fate, 
where strength is born, we shun. 

If our young men miscarry in their first enterprises, they lose 
all heart. If the young merchant fails, men say he is ruined. 
If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not 
installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or 
suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to 
himself that he is right in being disheartened and in complain- 
ing the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or 
Yermont, w r ho in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, 
farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, 
goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive 
years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred 
of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels 
no shame in not " studying a profession," for he does not post- 



36 ESSAY II. 

pone his life, but lives already. He has not one chance, but 
a hundred chances. Let a stoic arise who shall reveal the re- 
sources of man, and tell men they are not leaning willows, but 
can and must detach themselves ; that with the exercise of self- 
trust new powers shall appear ; that a man is the word made 
flesh, born to shed healing to the nations, that he should be 
ashamed of our compassion, and that the moment he acts from 
himself, tossing the laws, the books, idolatries, and customs out 
of the window, — we pity him no more, but thank and revere 
him, — and that teacher shall restore the life of man to splen- 
dour, and make his name dear to all History. 

It is easy to see that a greater self-reliance must work a 
revolution in all the offices and relations of men ; in their re- 
ligion ; in their education ; in their pursuits ; their modes of 
living; their association; in their property ; in their speculative 
views. 

1 . In what prayers do men allow themselves ! That which 
they call a holy office, is not so much as brave and manly. 
Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come 
through some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes 
of natural and supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. 
Prayer that craves a particular commodity — anything less than 
all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of 
life from the highest point of view\ It is the soliloquy of a 
beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronounc- 
ing his works good. But prayer, as a means to effect a private 
end, is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism, and not unity 
in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with 
God, he will not beg. He will then see prayer in all action. 
The prayer of the farmer kneeling in his field to weed it, the 
prayer of the rower kneeling with the stroke of his oar, are true 
prayers heard throughout nature, though for cheap ends. Cara- 
tach, in Fletcher's Bonduca, when admonished to inquire the 
mind of the god Audate, replies, 

His hidden meaning lies in our endeavours, 
Our valours are our best gods. 

Another sort of false prayers are our regrets. Discontent is 
the want of self-reliance ; it is infirmity of will. Eegret 
calamities, if you can thereby help the sufferer; if not, attend 
your own work, and already the evil begins to be repaired. Our 
sympathy is just as base. We come to them who weep foolishly, 
and sit down and cry for company, instead of imparting to them 
truth and health in rough electric shocks, putting them once more 



SELF-RELIANCE. 37 

in communication with their own reason. The secret of fortune 
is joy in our hands. Welcome evermore to gods and men is the 
self-helping man. For him all doors are flung wide. Him all 
tongues greet, all honours crown, all eyes follow with desire. 
Our love goes out to him and embraces him, because he did not 
need it. We solicitously and apologetically caress and celebrate 
him, because he held on Lis way and scorned our disapprobation. 
The gods love him because men hated him. " To the persever- 
ing mortal,' 1 said Zoroaster, "the blessed Immortals are swift." 
As men's prayers are a disease of the will, so are their creeds 
a disease of the intellect. They say with those foolish Israelites, 
" Let not God speak to us, lest we die. Speak thou, speak any 
man with us, and we will obey." Everywhere I am hindered of 
meeting God in my brother, because he has shut his own temple 
doors, and recites fables merely of his brother's, or his brother's 
brother's God. Every new mind is a new classification. If it 
prove a mind of uncommon activity and power, a Locke, a 
Lavoisier, a Hutton, a Bentharn, a Fourier, it imposes its classi- 
fication on other men, and lo I a new system. In proportion 
to the depth of the thought, and so to the number of the 
objects it touches and brings within reach of the pupil, is 
his complacency. But chiefly is this apparent in creeds and 
churches, which are also classifications of some powerful mind 
acting on the elemental thought of Duty, and man's rela- 
tion to the Highest. Such is Calvinism, Quakerism, Sweden- 
borgianism. The pupil takes the same delight in subordinating 
everything to the new terminology as a girl who has just learned 
botany, in seeing a new earth and new seasons thereby. It 
will happen for a time, that the pupil will find his intellectual 
power has grown by the study of his master's mind. But in all 
unbalanced minds, the classification is idolised, passes for the 
end, and not for a speedily exhaustible means, so that the walls 
of the system blend to their eye in the remote horizon with the 
walls of the universe ; the luminaries of heaven seem to them 
hung on the arch their master built. They cannot imagine how 
you aliens have any right to see, — how you can see : " It must 
be somehow that you stole the light from us." They do not yet 
perceive that light, unsystematic, indomitable, will break into 
any cabin, even into theirs. Let them chirp awhile and call it 
their own. If they are honest and do well, presently their neat 
new pinfold will be too strait and low, will crack, will lean, 
will rot and vanish, and the immortal light, all young and 
joyful, million-orbed, million- coloured, will beam over the uni- 
verse as on the first morning. 



38 ESSAY II. 

2. It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Tra- 
velling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its 
fascination for all educated Americans. They who made Eng- 
land, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination, did so 
by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In 
manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no 
traveller : the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, 
his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into 
foreign lands, he is at home still, and shall make men sensible 
by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary 
of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, 
and not like an interloper or a valet. 

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the 
globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so 
that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with 
the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who 
travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not 
carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth 
among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind 
have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to 
ruins. 

Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys 
the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at 
Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my 
sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the 
sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the 
stern Eact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. 
I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated 
with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My 
giant goes with me wherever I go. 

3. But the rage of travelling is itself only a symptom of 
a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. 
The intellect is vagabond, and our system of education fosters 
restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to 
stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the tra- 
velling of the mind ? Our houses are built with foreign taste ; 
our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments ; our opinions, 
our tastes, our faculties lean, and follow the Past and the Distant. 
The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was 
in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an 
application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the 
conditions to be observed. And why need we copy the Doric 
or the Gothic model ? Beauty, convenience, grandeur of thought, 
and quaint expression are as near to us as to any, and if the 



SELF-RELIANCE. 39 

American artist will study with hope and love the precise thing 
to be done by him, considering the climate, the soil, the length 
of the day, the wants of the people, the habit and form of the 
government, he will create a house in which all these will find 
themselves fitted, and taste and sentiment will be satisfied also. 

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Tour own gift you can 
present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's 
cultivation ; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only 
an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do 
best, none but his Maker can teach him. Xo man yet knows 
what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is 
the master who could have taught Shakspeare ? Where is the 
master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or 
Bacon, or Xewton ? Every great man is a unique. The 
Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. 
Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. 
Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much 
or dare too much. There is at this moment, there is for you 
an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of 
Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or 
Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul 
all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to 
repeat itself; bat if you can hear what these patriarchs say, 
surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice : for the 
ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in 
the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and 
thou shait reproduce the Eoreworld again. 

4. As our Eeligion, our Education, our Art look abroad, so 
does our spirit of society. All men plume themselves on the 
improvement of society, and no man improves. 

Society never advances. It recedes as fast on one side as it 
gains on the other. It undergoes continual changes : it is 
barbarous, it is civilized, it is christianized, it is rich, it is scien- 
tific ; but this change is not amelioration. For everything that 
is given, something is taken. Society acquires new arts and 
loses old instincts. What a contrast between the well-clad, 
reading, writing, thinking American, with a watch, a pencil, and 
a bill of exchange in his pocket, and the naked Xew Zealander, 
whose property is a club, a spear, a mat, and an undivided 
twentieth of a shed to sleep under. But compare the health of 
the two men, and you shall see that the white man has lost 
his aboriginal strength. If the traveller tell us truly, strike the 
savage with a broad axe, and in a day or two the flesh shall 



40 ESSAY II. 

unite and heal as if you struck the blow into soft pitch, and the 
same blow shall send the white to his grave. 

The civilized man has built a coach, but has lost the use of 
his feet. He is supported on crutches, but lacks so much sup- 
port of muscle. He has got a fine Geneva watch, but he fails 
of the skill to tell the hour by the sun. A Greenwich nautical 
almanack he has, and so, being sure of the information when he 
wants it, the man in the street does not know a star in the sky. 
The solstice he does not observe ; the equinox he knows as little ; 
and the whole bright calendar of the year is without a dial in 
his mind. His note-books impair his memory; his libraries 
overload his wit ; the insurance office increases the number of 
accidents ; and it may be a question whether machinery does not 
encumber ; whether we have not lost by refinement some energy, 
by a Christianity intrenched in establishments and forms, some 
vigour of wild virtue. For every stoic w T as a stoic; but in 
Christendom, where is the Christian ? 

There is no more deviation in the moral standard than in the 
standard of height or bulk. No greater men are now than ever 
were. A singular equality may be observed between the great 
men of the first and of the last ages ; nor can all the science, 
art, religion, and philosophy of the nineteenth century avail to 
educate greater men than Plutarch's heroes, three or four and 
twenty centuries ago. Not in time is the race progressive. 
Phocion, Socrates, Anaxagoras, Diogenes, are great men, but 
they leave no class. He who is really of their class will not be 
called by their name, but will be his own man, and in his turn 
the founder of a sect. The arts and inventions of each period 
are only its costume, and do not invigorate men. The harm of 
the improved machinery may compensate its good. Hudson and 
Behring accomplished so much in their fishing-boats, as to as- 
tonish Parry and Franklin, whose equipment exhausted the re- 
sources of science and art. Galileo, with an opera-glass, dis- 
covered a more splendid series of celestial phenomena than any 
one since. Columbus found the New World in an undecked 
boat. It is curious to see the periodical disuse and perishing of 
means and machinery which were introduced with loud lauda- 
tion, a few years or centuries before. The great genius returns 
to essential man. We reckoned the improvements of the art of 
war among the triumphs of science, and yet Napoleon conquered 
Europe by the bivouac, w r hich consisted of falling back on naked 
valour, and disencumbering it of all aids. The Emperor held it 
impossible to make a perfect army, says Las Casas, cc without 



SELF-RELIANCE. 41 

abolishing our arms, magazines, commissaries and carriages; 
until, in imitation of the Roman custom, the soldier should 
receive his supply of corn, grind it in his hand-mill, and bake 
his bread himself." 

Society is a wave. The wave moves onward, but the water 
of which it is composed, does not. The same particle does not 
rise from the valley to the ridge. Its unity is only phenomenal. 
The persons who make up a nation to-day, next year die, and 
their experience with them. 

And so the reliance on Property, including the reliance on 
governments which protect it, is the want of self-reliance. Men 
have looked away from themselves and at things so long, that 
they have come to esteem what they call the soul's progress, 
namely, the religious, learned, and civil institutions, as guards 
of property, and they deprecate assaults on these, because they 
feel them to be assaults on property. They measure their esteem 
of each other by what each has, and not by what each is. 
But a cultivated man becomes ashamed of his property, ashamed 
of what he has, out of new respect for his nature. Especially he 
hates what he has, if he see that it is accidental, — came to him 
by inheritance, or gift, or crime ; then he feels that it is not 
having; it does not belong to him, has no root in him, and 
merely lies there, because no revolution or no robber takes it 
away. But that which a man is does always by necessity ac- 
quire, and what the man acquires, is permanent and living pro- 
perty, which does not wait the beck of rulers, or mobs, or revo- 
lutions, or fire, or storm, or bankruptcies, but perpetually renews 
itself wmerever the man breathes. " Thy lot or portion of life," 
said the Caliph Ali, " is seeking after thee ; therefore be at rest 
from seeking after it." Our dependence on these foreign goods 
leads us to our slavish respect for numbers. The political parties 
meet in numerous conventions : the greater the concourse, and 
with each new uproar of announcement, The delegation from 
Essex ! The Democrats from New Hampshire ! The Whigs of 
Maine ! the young patriot feels himself stronger than before by 
a new thousand of eyes and arms. In like manner the reformers 
summon conventions, and vote and resolve in multitude. But 
not so, friends ! will the God deign to enter and inhabit 
you, but by a method precisely the reverse. It is only as a 
man puts off all foreign support, and stands alone, that I see 
him to be strong and to prevail. He is weaker by every recruit 
to his banner. Is not a man better than a town ? Ask nothing 
of men, and in the endless mutation, thou only firm column 
must presently appear the upholder of all that surrounds thee. 



42 ESSAY II. 

He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because 
he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and so per- 
ceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly 
rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, 
works miracles ; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger 
than a man who stands on his head. 

So use all that is called Fortune. Most men gamble with her, 
and gain all, and lose all, as her wheel rolls. But do thou leave 
as unlawful these winnings, and deal with Cause and Effect, the 
chancellors of Grod. In the Will work and acquire, and thou 
hast chained the wheel of Chance, and shalt sit hereafter out of 
fear from her rotations. A political victory, a rise of rents, the 
recovery of your sick, or the return of your absent friend, or 
some other favourable event, raises your spirits, and you think 
good days are preparing for you. Do not believe it. It can 
never be so. Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. No- 
thing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. 



COMPENSATION. 



rings of Time are black and white. 
Pied with morning and with night. 

Mountain tall and ocean deep 
Trembling balance duly keep. 
In changing moon, in tidal wave, 
Glows the feud of "VTant and Have. 
Gauge of more and less through space 
Electric star and penal plays. 
The lonely Earth amid the balk 
That hurry through the eternal halls, 
A makeweight flying to the void. 
Supplemental asteroid, 
Or compensatory spark, 
Shoots across the neutral Dark. 



Man is the elm and wealth the vine ; 

Staunch and strong the tendrils twine. 

Though the frail ringlets thee deceive, 

None from its stock that vine can reave- 

Fear not, then, thou child infirm, 

There 's no god dare wrong a worm. 

Laurel crowns cleave to deserts, 

And power to him who power exerts ; 

Hast not thy share? on winged feet, 

Lo ! it rushes thee to meet ; 

And all that Nature made thy own, 

Floating in air or pent in stone, 

Will rive the hills and swim the sea, , 

And, like thy shadow, follow thee. 



ESSAY III. 



COMPENSATION. 



Ever since I was a boy. T have wished to write a discourse on 
Compensation : for it seemed to me, when very young, that, on 
, this subject. Life was ahead of theology, and the people knew 
more than the preachers taught. The documents, too, from which 
the doctrine is to be drawn, charmed my fancy by their endless 
variety, and lay always before me. even in sleep ; for they are 
the tools in our hands, the bread in our basket, the transactions 
of the street, the farm, and the dwelling-house, the greetings, 
the relations, the debts and credits, the influence of character, 
the nature and endowment of all men. It seemed to me, also, 
that in it might be shown men a ray of divinity, the present action 
of the Soul of this world, clean from all vestige of tradition, and 
so the heart of man might be bathed by an inundation of eter- 
nal love, conversing with that which he knows was always, and 
always must be because it really is now. It appeared, moreover, 
that if this doctrine could be stated in terms with any resem- 
blance to those bright intuitions in which this truth is sometimes 
revealed to us, it would be a star in many dark hours and crooked 
passages in our journey that would not suffer us to lose our 
way. 

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon 
at church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, 
unfolded in the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judg- 
ment. He assumed that judgment is not executed in this world ; 
that the wicked are successful : that the good are miserable ; 
and then urged from reason and from Scripture a compensation 
to be made to both parties in the next life. No offence appeared 
to be taken by the congregation at this doctrine. As far as I 
could observe, when the meeting broke up, they separated with- 
out remark on the sermon. 

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the 



46 ESSAY III. 

preacher mean by saying that the good are miserable in the 
present life ? Was it that houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, 
dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are 
poor and despised ; and that a compensation is to be made to 
these last hereafter, by giving them the like gratification another 
day, — bank-stock and doubloons, venison and champagne ? 
This must be the compensation intended ; for, what else ? Is 
it that they are to have leave to pray and praise ? to love and 
serve men ? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate in- 
ference the disciple would draw, was — u We are to have such a 
good time as the sinners have now ;" — or, to push it to its ex- 
treme import — " You sin now ; we shall sin by-and-by : we 
would sin now, if we could ; not being successful, we expect our 
revenge to-morrow." 

The fallacy lay in the immense concession that the bad are 
successful ; that justice is not done now. The blindness of the 
preacher consisted in deferring to the base estimate of the mar- 
ket of what constitutes a manly success, instead of confronting 
and convicting the world from the truth ; announcing the Pre- 
sence of the Soul ; the omnipotence of the Will : and so esta- 
blishing the standard of good and ill, of success and falsehood, 
and summoning the dead to its present tribunal. 

I find a similar base tone in the popular religious works of ' 
the day, and the same doctrines assumed by the literary men 
when occasionally they treat the related topics. I think that 
our popular theology has gained in decorum, and not in princi- 
ple, over the superstitions it has displaced. But men are better 
than this theology. Their daily life gives' it the lie. Every in- 
genuous and aspiring soul leaves the doctrine behind him in his 
own experience ; and all men feel sometimes the falsehood which 
they cannot demonstrate. For men are wiser than they know: 
That which they hear in schools and pulpits without after- 
thought, if said in conversation, would probably be questioned 
in silence. If a man dogmatize in a mixed company on Provi- 
dence and the divine laws, he is answered by a silence which 
conveys well enough to an observer the dissatisfaction of the 
hearer, but his incapacity to make his own statement. 

I shall attempt in this and the following chapter to record 
some facts that indicate the path of the law of Compensation ; 
happy beyond my expectation, if I shall truly draw the smallest 
arc of this circle. 

Polarity, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of 
nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb 



COMPENSATION. 47 

and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and 
expiration of plants and animals ; in the systole and diastole of 
the heart ; in the undulations of fluids, and of sound ; in the 
centrifugal and centripetal gravity ; in electricity, galvanism, and 
chemical affinity. Superinduce magnetism at one end of a 
needle ; the opposite magnetism takes place at the other end. 
If the south attracts, the north repels. An inevitable dualism 
bisects nature, so that each thing is a half, and suggests another 
thing to make it whole ; as spirit, matter ; man, woman ; sub- 
jective, objective; in, out; upper, under; motion, rest; yea, 

na y- 

Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. 
The entire system of tilings gets represented in every particle. 
There is somewhat that resembles the ebb and flow of the sea, 
day and night, man and woman, in a single needle of the pine, 
in a kernel of corn, in each individual of every animal tribe. 
The reaction, so grand in the elements, is repeated within these 
small boundaries. For example, in the animal kingdom, the 
physiologist has observed that no creatures are favourites, but a 
certain compensation balances every gift and every defect. A. 
surplusage given to one part is paid out of a reduction from 
another part of the same creature. If the head and neck are 
enlarged, the trunk and extremities are cut short. 

The theory of the mechanic forces is another example. What 
we gain in power is lost in time ; and the converse. The 
periodic or compensating errors of the planets, is another in- 
stance. The influences of climate and soil in political history 
are another. The cold climate invigorates. The barren soil 
does not breed fevers, crocodiles, tigers, or scorpions. 

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. 
Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every 
sweet hath its sour ; every evil its good. Every faculty which 
is a receiver of pleasure, has an equal penalty put on its abuse. 
It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain 
of wit there is a grain of folly. For everything you have 
missed, you have gained something else ; and for everything you 
gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased 
that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes 
out of the man what she puts into his chest ; swells the estate, 
but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. 
The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from 
their loftiest tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to 
equalize themselves. There is always some levelling circum- 
stance that puts down the overbearing, the strong, the rich, the 



48 ESSAY III. 

fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others. Is 
a man too strong and tierce for society, and by temper and posi- 
tion a bad citizen, — a morose ruffian with a dash of the pirate 
in him ; — nature sends him a troop of pretty sons and daugh- 
ters who are getting along in the dame's classes at the village 
school, and love and fear for them smooths his grim scowls to 
courtesy. Thus she contrives to intenerate the granite and fel- 
spar, takes the boar out and puts the lamb in, and keeps her 
balance true. 

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But 
the President has paid dear for his White House. It has com- 
monly cost him all his peace and the best of his manly attributes. 
To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before 
the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who 
stand erect behind the throne. Or, do men desire the more 
substantial and permanent grandeur of genius ? Neither has 
this an immunity. He who by force of will or of thought is 
great, and overlooks thousands, has the charges of that emi- 
nence. With every influx of light, comes new danger. Has 
he light ? He must bear witness to the light, and always out- 
run that sympathy which gives him such keen satisfaction, by 
his fidelity to new revelations of the incessant soul. He must 
hate father and mother, wife and child. Has he all that the 
world loves and admires and covets ? He must cast behind 
him their admiration, and afflict them by faithfulness to his 
truth, and become a by- word and a hissing. 

This Law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is iu vain 
to build or plot or combine against it. Things refuse to be 
mismanaged long. Res nolunt diu male administrari. Though 
no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist and will appear. 
If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If 
you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make 
the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the 
law is too mild, private vengeance comes in. If the government 
is a terrific democracy, the pressure is resisted by an overcharge 
of energy in the citizen, and life glows with a fiercer flame. No- 
thing arbitrary, nothing artificial can endure. The true life and 
satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigours or felici- 
ties of condition, and to establish themselves with great indif- 
ferency under all varieties of circumstance. Under all governments 
the influence of character remains the same, — in Turkey and in 
New England about alike. Under the primeval despots of 
Egypt, history honestly confesses that man must have been as 
free as culture could make him. 



COMPENSATION. 49 

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is repre- 
sented in every one of its particles. Everything in nature con- 
tains all the powers of nature. Everything is made of one 
hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every meta- 
morphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a 
swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. 
Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, 
but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hin- 
drances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every 
occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, 
and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem 
of human life ; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its 
course, and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate 
the whole man, and recite all his destiny. 

The world globes itself in a drop of dew. The microscope 
cannot find the animalcule which is less perfect for being little. 
Eyes, ears, taste, smell, motion, resistance, appetite, and organs 
of reproduction that take hold on eternity, — all find room to 
consist in the small creature. So do we put our life into every 
act. The true doctrine of omnipresence is, that God reappears 
with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the 
universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good 
is there, so is the evil ; if the affinity, so the repulsion ; if the 
force, so the limitation. 

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul 
which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel 
its inspirations ; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. 
"It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is 
not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balances in all parts 
of life. Ol Kvpoi, Ai6g uzi evTriirTova-^ The dice of God are 
always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table or 
a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances 
itself. Take what figure you will, its exact value, nor more or 
less, still returns to you. Every secret is told, every crime is 
punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in 
silence and certainty. What we call retribution, is the uni- 
versal necessity, by which the whole appears wherever a part 
appears. If you see smoke, there must be fire. If you see a 
hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is 
there behind. 

Every act rewards itself, or, in other words, integrates itself 
in a twofold manner; first, in the thing, or in real nature ; and, 
secondly, in the circumstance, or in apparent nature. Men call 
the circumstance the retribution. The causal retribution is in 



50 ESSAY III. 

the thing, and is seen by the soul. The retribution in the cir- 
cumstance is seen by the understanding ; it is inseparable from 
the thing, but is often spread over a long time, and so does not 
become distinct until after many years. The specific stripes 
may follow late after the offence, but they follow because they 
accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. 
Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens within the flower 
of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means 
and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed ; for the effect already 
blooms in the cause, the end pre-exists in the means, the fruit 
in the seed. 

Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be dis- 
parted, we seek to act partially ; to sunder ; to appropriate ; for 
example, — to gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the 
senses from the needs of the character. The ingenuity of man 
has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem, — how 
to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual 
bright, &c, from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral 
fair ; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper sur- 
face so thin as to leave it bottomless ; to get a one end without 
an other end. The soul says, Eat ; the body would feast. The 
soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul ; 
the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have domi- 
nion over all things to the ends of virtue ; the body would have 
the power over things to its own ends. 

The soul strives amain to live and work through all things. 
It would be the only fact. All things shall be added unto it, 
— power, pleasure, knowledge, beauty. The particular man 
aims to be somebody; to set up for himself; to truck and higgle 
for a private good ; and, in particulars, to ride, that he may 
ride ; to dress, that he may be dressed ; to eat, that he may 
eat ; and to govern, that he may be seen. Men seek to be great ; 
they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think 
that to be great is to possess one side of nature — the sweet, 
without the other side — the bitter. 

This dividing and detaching is steadily counteracted. Up to 
this day, it must be owned, no projector has had the smallest 
success. The parted water reunites behind our hand. Pleasure 
is taken out of pleasant things, profit out of profitable things, 
power out of strong things, as soon as we seek to separate 
them from the whole. We can no more halve things and get 
the sensual good, by itself, than we can get an inside that shall 
have no outside, or a light without a shadow. " Drive out 
Nature with a fork, she comes running back." 



COMPENSATION. 51 

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise 
seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not 
know ; that they do not tonch him ; — but the brag is on his 
lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in 
one part, they attack him in another more vital part. If he has 
escaped them in form, and in the appearance, it is that he has 
resisted his life, and fled from himself, and the retribution is so 
much death. So signal is the failure of all attempts to make 
this separation of the good from the tax, that the experiment 
would not be tried, — since to try it is to be mad,— but for the 
circumstance, that when the disease began in the will, of rebel- 
lion and separation, the intellect is at once infected, so that the 
man ceases to see God whole in each object, but is able to see 
the sensual allurement of an object, and not see the sensual 
hurt ; he sees the mermaid's head, but not the dragon's tail ; 
and thinks he can cut off that which he would have, from that 
which he would not have. Ci How secret art thou who dwellest 
in the highest heavens in silence, thou only great God, sprink- 
ling with an unwearied Providence certain penal blindnesses 
upon such as have unbridled desires ! " * 

The human soul is true to these facts in the painting of fable, 
of history, of law, of proverbs, of conversation. It finds a 
tongue in literature unawares. Thus the Greeks called Jupiter, 
Supreme Mind ; but having traditionally ascribed to him many 
base actions, they involuntarily made amends to Reason, by 
tying up the hands of so bad a god. He is made as helpless as 
a king of England. Prometheus knows one seciet, which Jove 
must bargain for; Minerva another. He cannot get his own 
thunders ; Minerva keeps the key of them. 

Of all the gods I only know the keys 

That ope the solid doors within whose vaults 

His thunders sleep. 

A plain confession of the in-working of the All, and of its 
moral aim. The Indian mythology ends in the same ethics ; and 
it WT>uld seem impossible for any fable to be invented and get 
any currency which was not moral. Aurora forgot to ask youth 
for her lover, and so, though Tithonus is immortal, he is old. 
Achilles is not quite invulnerable; the sacred waters did not 
wash the heel by which Thetis held him. Siegfried, in the 
Xibelungen, is not quite immortal; for a leaf fell on his back 
whilst he was bathing in the Dragon's blood, and that spot 
which it covered is mortal. And so it must be. There is 
* St. Augustin : Confessions, b. i. 

D 2 



52 ESSAY III. 

a crack in everything God has made. There is, it would seem, 
always this vindictive circumstance stealing in at unawares, 
even into the wild poesy in which the human fancy attempted 
to make bold holiday, and to shake itself free of the old laws 
— this backstroke, this kick of the gun, certifying that the law 
is fatal; that in Nature nothing can be given, all things are 
sold. 

This is that ancient doctrine of Nemesis, who keeps watch in 
the Universe, and lets no offence go unchastised. The Furies, 
they said, are attendants on Justice, and if the sun in heaven 
should transgress his path, they would punish him. The poets 
related that stone walls, and iron swords, and leathern thongs, 
had an occult sympathy with the wrongs of their owners; that 
the belt which Ajax gave Hector, dragged the Trojan hero over 
the held at the wheels of the car of Achilles ; and the sword 
which Hector gave Ajax, was that on whose point Ajax fell. 
They recorded that, when the Thasians erected a statue to 
Theagenes, a victor in the games, one of his rivals went to it 
by night, and endeavoured to throw it down by repeated blows, 
until at last he moved it from its pedestal, and was crushed to 
death beneath its fall. 

This voice of fable has in it somewhat divine. It came from 
thought above the will of the writer. That is the best part of 
each writer, which has nothing private in it, that which he does 
not know, that which flowed out of his constitution, and not 
from his too active invention ; that which in the study of a 
single artist you might not easily find, but in the study of all, 
you would abstract as the spirit of them all. Phidias it is not, 
but the work of man in that early Hellenic world, that I would 
know. The name and circumstance of Phidias, however con- 
venient for history, embarrass when we come to the highest 
criticism. We are to see that which man was tending to do 
in a given period, and was hindered, or, if you will, modified 
in doing, by the interfering volitions of Phidias, of Dante, of 
Shakspeare, the organ whereby man at the moment wrought. 

Still more striking is the expression of this fact in the pro- 
verbs of all nations, which are always the literature of reason, 
or the statements of an absolute truth, without qualification. 
Proverbs, like the sacred books of each nation, are the sanctuary 
of the Intuitions. That which the droning w*orld, chained to 
appearances, will not allow the realist to say in his own words, 
it will suffer him to say in proverbs, without contradiction. 
And this law of laws, which the pulpit, the senate, and the 
college deny, is hourly preached in all markets and all workshops 



COMPENSATION. 53 

by flights of proverbs, whose teaching is as true and as omni- 
present as that of birds and flies. 

All things are double, one against another. — Tit for tat ; an 
eye for an eye ; a tooth for a tooth ; blood for blood ; measure 
for measure ; love for love. — Give, and it shall be given you. 
— He that watereth shall be watered himself. — What will you 
have? quoth Grod ; pay for it, and take it.— Nothing venture, 
nothing have. — Thou shalt be paid exactly for what thou hast 
done, no more, no less. — Who doth not work shall not eat. — 
Harm w r atch, harm catch. — Curses always recoil on the head of 
him who imprecates them. — If you put a chain around the neck 
of a slave, the other end fastens itself around your own. — Bad 
counsel confounds the adviser. — The Devil is an ass. 

It is thus written, because it is thus in life. Our action is 
over-mastered, and characterized above our will by the law ol 
nature. We aim at a petty end quite aside from the public 
good, but our act arranges itself by irresistible magnetism in a 
line with the poles of the world. 

A man cannot speak but he judges himself. With his will, 
or against his will, he draws his portrait to the eye of his com- 
panions by every word. Every opinion reacts on him who utters 
it. It is a thread-ball thrown at a mark, but the other end 
remains in the thrower's bag. Or rather, it is a harpoon hurled 
at the whale, unwinding, as it flies, a coil of cord in the boat, 
and if the harpoon is not good, or not well thrown, it will go 
nigh to cut the steersman in twain, or to sink the boat. 

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong. " No man 
had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him," said 
Burke. The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he 
excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate 
it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the 
door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. Treat 
men as pawns and ninepins, and you shall suffer as well as they. 
If you leave out their heart, you shall lose your own. The senses 
would make things of all persons ; of women, of children, of the 
poor. The vulgar proverb, " I will get it from his purse, or 
get it from his skin," is sound philosophy. 

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are 
speedily punished. They are punished by Pear. Whilst I stand 
in simple relations to my fellow man, I have no displeasure in 
meeting him. We meet as water meets water, or as two cur- 
rents of air mix, with perfect diffusion and interpenetration of 
nature. But as soon as there is any departure from simplicity, 
and attempt at halfness, or good for me that is not good for him, 



54 ESSAY III. 

my neighbour feels the wrong; he shrinks from me as far as I 
have shrunk from him ; his eyes no longer seek mine ; there is 
war between us ; there is hate in him and fear in me. 

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all 
unjust accumulations of property and power, are avenged in 
the same manner. Pear is an instructor of great sagacity, and 
the herald of all revolutions. One thing he teaches, and 
there is rottenness where he appears. He is a carrion crow, 
and though you see not well what he hovers for, there is 
death somewhere. Our property is timid, our laws are timid, 
our cultivated classes are timid. Fear for ages has boded, 
and mowed, and gibbered over government and property. That 
obscene bird is not there for nothing. He indicates great 
wrongs which must be revised. 

Of the like nature is that expectation of change which in- 
stantly follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The 
terror of cloudless noon, the emerald of Poly crates, the awe of 
prosperity, the instinct which leads every generous soul to im- 
pose on itself tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, 
are the tremblings of the balance of justice through the heart and 
mind of man. 

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is 
best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a man often 
pays dear for a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own 
debt. Has a man gained anything who has received a hundred 
favours and rendered none? Has he gained by borrowing, 
through indolence or cunning, his neighbour's wares, or horses, 
or money ? There arises on the deed the instant acknowledg- 
ment of benefit on the one part, and of debt on the other ; that 
is, of superiority and inferiority. The transaction remains in 
the memory of himself and his neighbour ; and every new trans- 
action alters, according to its nature, their relation to each other. 
He may soon come to see that he had better have broken his 
own bones, than to have ridden in his neighbour's coach, and 
that " the highest price he can pay for a thing is to ask for 
it." 

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and 
know that it is the part of prudence to face every claimant, 
and pay every just demand on your time, your talents, or your 
heart. Always pay ; for, first or last, you must pay your en- 
tire debt. Persons and events may stand for a time between 
you and justice, but it is only a postponement. You must pay 
at last your own debt. If you are wise, you will dread a pros- 
perity which only loads you with more. Benefit is the end of 



COMPENSATION. 

nature. But for every I e. a tax is levif ... 

He is ho confers the most benefits. He is - — 

that is the one base thing in the universe — 
and render none. In the order of nature we cannol 
benefits to those for whom we rec n a or only seldom. 

But the benefit we receive must be i :.: . inc. 

deed for deed. cent, for cent., to somebody. Beware of toe 
much good staying in your hand. It will fast con;/ n worm 
worms. Pay it away quickly in some sort. 

Labour is watched over by the same pitiless laws. Cheapest, 
the prudent, is the dearest labour. TVhat we buy in a broom, 
a mat, a wagon, a knife, is some application of good sense to a 
common want. It is be ; : :: pay in your land a skilful gardener, 
or to buy good sense applied tc gardening; in your sailor, good 
sense applied to navigation : in the house, good a ens e pptied tc 
cooking, sewing, serving; in your agent, good sense applied :: 
accounts and affairs. So do you multiply yom presence, :: 
spread yourself throughout your estate. Bu: because :: the 
dual constitution of things, in labour as in life there can be 
no cheating. The thief steals from himself, lit windier 
swindles himself. Tor the real price of labour is knowledge and 
virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs. These signs, like 
paper money, may be counterfeited :: stolen: but that which 
they represent — namely, knowledge and virtue — cannot be coun- 
terfeited or stolen. These ends ::" labour cannot be answered 
but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience to pure 
motives. The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cann;: extort 
the knowledge of material and mora, naf ore which his honest 
care and pains yield to the operative. The law of nature is, 
Do the thing, and you shall have the power : but they wh : 
not the thing have not the power. 

Human labour, through all its forms, from the sharpening of a 
stake to the construction of :r an epic, is me immense 

illustration of the perfect compensation of the universe. Hie 
absolute balance of Give and Take, the loctrine that everything 
has its price, and if that price is not paid, not that thing but 
something else is obtained, and that it is impossible to get any- 
thing without its price, — is not less sublime in the columns of 
a ledger than in the budgets of states, in the laws of light and 
darkness, in all the action and reaction of nature. I cannot 
doubt that the high laws which each man Sees ::_:': o_::-.:t :.. in 
those processes with which he is conversant, the stern ethics 
which sparkle on his chisel-edge, which are measured out by his 



56 ESSAY III. 

plumb and foot-rule, which stand as manifest in the footing of 
the shop-bill as in the history of a state, — do recommend to him 
his trade, and, though seldom named, exalt his business to his 
imagination. 

The league between virtue and nature engages all things to 
assume a hostile front to vice. The beautiful laws and sub- 
stances of the world persecute and whip the traitor. He finds 
that things are arranged for truth and benefit, but there is no 
den in the wide world to hide a rogue. Commit a crime, and 
the earth is made of glass. Commit a crime, and it seems as if 
a coat of snow fell on the ground, such as reveals in the woods 
the track of every partridge, and fox, and squirrel, and mole. 
You cannot recall the spoken word, you cannot wipe out the 
foot-track, you cannot draw up the ladder, so as to leave no inlet 
or clue. Some damning circumstance always transpires. The 
laws and substances of nature, water, snow, wind, gravitation, 
become penalties to the thief. 

On the other hand, the law holds with equal sureness for all 
right action. Love, and you shall be loved. All love is mathe- 
matically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation. 
The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns every- 
thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm ; 
but as the royal armies sent against Napoleon, when he ap- 
proached, cast down their colours, and from enemies became 
friends, so do disasters of all kinds, as sickness, offence, poverty, 
prove benefactors. 

Winds blow and waters roll 
Strength to the brave, and power and deity, 
Yet in themselves are nothing. 

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As 
no man had ever a point of pride that was" not injurious to him, 
so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made 
useful to him. The stag in the fable admired his horns and 
blamed his feet ; but when the hunter came, his feet saved him, 
and afterwards, caught in the thicket, his horns destroyed him. 
Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults. As no 
man thoroughly understands a truth until he has contended 
against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the 
hindrances or talents of men, until he has suffered from the one, 
and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the 
same. Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in 
society ? Thereby he is driven to entertain himself alone, and 



COMPENSATION. 57 

acquire habits of self-help ; and thus, like the wounded oyster, 
he mends his shell with pearl. 

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation 
which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we 
are pricked and stung, and sorely assailed. A great man is 
always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion 
of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tor- 
mented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something ; he has 
been put on his wits, on his manhood ; he has gained facts ; 
learns his ignorance ; he is cured of the insanity of conceit ; has 
got moderation and real skill. The wise man throws himself on 
the side of his assailants. It is more to his interest than it is 
theirs to find his weak point. The wound cicatrizes and falls 
off from him like a dead skin, and when they would triumph, 
lo ! he has passed on invulnerable. Blame is safer than praise. 
I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is 
said, is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. 
But as soon as honied words of praise are spoken for me, I feel 
as one that lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, 
every evil to which we do not succumb, is a benefactor. As the 
Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valour of the 
enemy he kills, passes into himself, so we gain the strength of 
the temptation we resist. 

The same guards which protect us from disaster, defect, and 
enmity, defend us, if we will, from selfishness and fraud. 
Bolts and bars are not the best of our institutions, nor is shrewd- 
ness in trade a mark of wisdom. Men suffer all their life long, 
under the foolish superstition that they can be cheated. But 
it is as impossible for a man to be cheated by any one but him- 
self, as for a thing to be, and not to be, at the same time. 
There is a third silent party to all our bargains. The nature 
and soul of things takes on itself the guarantee of the fulfilment 
of every contract, so that honest service cannot come to loss. If 
you serve an ungrateful master, serve him the more. Put Grod in 
your debt. Every stroke shall be repaid. The longer the pay- 
ment is withholden, the better for you ; for compound interest 
on compound interest is the rate and usage of this exchequer. 

The history of persecution is a history of endeavours to cheat 
nature, to make water run up hill, to twist a rope of sand. 
It makes no difference whether the actors be many or one, a 
tyrant or a mob. A mob is a society of bodies voluntarily be- 
reaving themselves of reason, and traversing its work. The 
mob is man voluntarily descending to the nature of the beast. 
Its fit hour of activity is night. Its actions are insane, like its 

D 3 



58 ESSAY III. 

whole constitution. It persecutes a principle ; it would whip a 
right ; it would tar and feather justice, by inflicting Are and 
outrage upon the houses and persons of those who have these. 
It resembles the pranks of boys who run with fire-engines to 
put out the ruddy aurora streaming to the stars. The inviolate 
spirit turns their spite against the wrong-doers. The martyr 
cannot be dishonoured. Every lash inflicted is a tongue of 
fame ; every prison a more illustrious abode ; every burned book 
or house enlightens the world ; every suppressed or expunged 
word reverberates through the earth from side to side. Hours 
of sanity and consideration are always arriving to communities, 
as to individuals, when the truth is seen and the martyrs are 
justified. 

Thus do all things preach the indifferency of circumstances. 
The man is all. Everything has two sides, a good and an evil. 
Every advantage has its tax. I learn to be content. But the 
doctrine of compensation is not the doctrine of indifferency. 
The thoughtless say, on hearing these representations, — What 
boots it to do well ? there is one event to good and evil : if I 
gain any good, I must pay for it ; if I lose any good, I gain 
some other : all actions are indifferent. 

There is a deeper fact in the soul than compensation, to wit, 
its own nature. The soul is not a compensation, but a life. 
The soul is. Under all this running sea of circumstance, whose 
waters ebb and flow with perfect balance, lies the ab-original 
abyss of real Being. Essence, or God, is not a relation, or a 
part, but the whole. Being is the vast affirmative, excluding 
negation, self-balanced, and swallowing up all relations, parts, 
and times, within itself. Nature, truth, virtue, are the influx 
from thence. Vice is the absence or departure of the same. 
Nothing, Falsehood, may indeed stand as the great Night or 
shade, on which, as a background, the living universe paints 
itself forth ; but no fact is begotten by it ; it cannot work ; for 
it is not. It cannot work any good ; it cannot work any harm. 
It is harm, inasmuch as it is worse not to be than to be. 

"We feel defrauded of the retribution due to evil acts, because 
the criminal adheres to his vice and contumacy, and does not 
come to a crisis or judgment anywhere in visible nature. There 
is no stunning confutation of his nonsense before men and 
angels. Has he therefore outwitted the law ? Inasmuch as he 
carries the malignity and the lie with him, he so far deceases 
from nature. In some manner there will be a demonstration of 
the wrong to the understanding also ; but should we not see it, 
this deadly deduction makes square the eternal account. 



COMPENSATION. 59 



of 



Neither can it be said, on the other hand, that the gain of 
rectitude must be bought by any loss. There is no penalty to 
virtue ; no penalty to wisdom ; they are proper additious of 
being. In a virtuous action, I properly am ; in a virtuous act, 
I add to the world ; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos 
and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the 
horizon. There can be no excess to love ; none to knowledge ; 
none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the 
purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an 
Optimism, never a Pessimism. 

His life is a progress, and not a station. His instinct is trust. 
Our instinct uses " more " and ;J less " in application to man, 
of the presence of the soul, and not of its absence ; the brave 
man is greater than the coward ; the true, the benevolent, the 
wise, is more a man, and not less, than the fool and knave. 
There is no tax on the good of virtue: for that is the in- 
coming of God himself, or absolute existence, without any 
comparative. Material good has its tax, and if it came with- 
out desert or sweat, has no root in me, and. the next v\ind will 
blow it away. But all the good of nature is the soul's, and. 
may be had, if paid for in nature's lawful coin; that is, by 
labour which the heart and the head allow. I no longer wish 
to meet a good I do not earn, for example to rind a pot of 
buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new bnrdens. 
I do not wish more external goods, — neither possessions, nor 
honours, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent : the 
tax is certain. But there is no tax on the knowledge that the 
compensation exists, and that it is not desirable to dig up trea- 
sure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I contract 
the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of St. 
Bernard, ''''Nothing can work me damage except myself; the 
harm that I sustain, I carry about with me, and never am a real 
sufferer but by my own fault.'"' 

In the nature of the soul is the compensation for the inequa- 
lities of condition. The radical tragedy of nature seems to be 
the distinction of More and Less. How can Less not feel the 
pain ; how not feel indignation or malevolence towards More ? 
Look at those who have less faculty, and one feels sad, and 
knows not well what to make of it. He almost shuns their 
eye ; he fears they will upbraid God. What should they do ? 
It seems a great injustice. But see the facts nearly, and these 
mountainous inequalities vanish. Love reduces them, as the 
sun melts the iceberg in the sea. The heart and soul of all men 
being one, this bitterness of Els and Mine ceases. His is mine. 



60 ESSAY III. 

I am my brother, and my brother is me. If I feel overshadowed 
and outdone by great neighbours, I can yet love ; I can still 
receive ; and he that loveth maketh his own the grandeur he 
loves. Thereby I make the discovery that my brother is my 
guardian, acting for me with the friendliest designs, and the 
estate I so admired and envied is my own. It is the nature of 
the soul to appropriate all things. Jesus and Shakspeare are 
fragments of the soul, and by love I conquer and incorporate 
them in my own conscious domain. His virtue, — is not that 
mine ? His wit, if it cannot be made mine, is not wit. 

Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. The changes 
which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men, are 
advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is 
by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its 
friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls 
out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of 
its growth, and slowly forms a new house. In proportion to the 
vigour of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in 
some happier mind they are incessant, and all worldly relations 
hang very loosely about him, becoming, as it were, a transparent 
fluid membrane, through which the living form is seen, and not, 
as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many 
dates, and of no settled character, in which the man is impri- 
soned. Then there can be enlargement, and the man of to-day 
scarcely recognises the man of yesterday. And such should be 
the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead 
circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. 
But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting not advancing, resisting 
not co-operating with the divine expansion, this growth comes 
by shocks. 

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels 
go. We do not see that they only go out, that arch-angels may 
come in. We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe 
in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. 
We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or re- 
create that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the 
old tent, where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor 
believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We 
cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we 
sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, " Up 
and onward for evermore !" We cannot stay amid the ruins. 
Neither will we rely on the New ; and so we walk ever with 
reverted eyes, like those monsters who look backwards. 

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to 



COMPENSATION. 61 

the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a 
mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of 
friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But 
the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all 
facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which 
seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect 
of a guide or genius ; for it commonly operates revolutions in 
our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which 
was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a 
household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new 
ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or 
constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the reception 
of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next 
years ; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny 
garden flower, with no room for its roots, and too much sunshine 
for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the 
gardener, is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and 
fruit to wide neighbourhoods of men. 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 



The living Heaven thy prayers respect, 
House at once and architect, 
Quarrying mans rejected hours, 
Builds there with eternal towers ; 
Sole and self-commanded works, 
Fears not undermining days, 
Grows by decays ; 

And, by the famous might that lurks 
In reaction and recoil, 
Makes flame to freeze and ice to boil ; 
Forging, through swart arms of Offence, 
The silver seat of Innocence. 



ESSAY IV. 

SPIRITUAL LAWS. 



When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we 
look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our 
life is embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things 
assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things 
familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible are comely, 
as they take their place in the pictures of memory. The river- 
bank, the weed at the water-side, the old house, the foolish per- 
son — however neglected in the passing — have a grace in the past. 
Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn 
ornament to the house. The soul will not know either defor- 
mity or pain. If in the hours of clear reason we should speak 
the severest truth, we should say that we had never made a 
sacrifice. In these hours the mind seems so great, that nothing 
can be taken from us that seems much. All loss, all pain, is 
particular : the universe remains to the heart unhurt. Neither 
vexations nor calamities abate our trust. No man ever stated 
his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for exaggeration in the 
most patient and sorely-ridden hack that ever was driven. For 
it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered ; the infinite 
lies stretched in smiling repose. 

The intellectual life may be kept clean and healthful, if man 
will live the life of nature, and not import into his mind diffi- 
culties which are none of his. No man need be perplexed in 
his speculations. Let him do and say what strictly belongs to 
him, and though very ignorant of books, his nature shall not 
yield him any intellectual obstructions and doubts. Our young 
people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, 
origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These never pre- 
sented a practical difficulty to any man, — never darkened across 



66 ESSAY IV. 

any man's road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. 
These are the soul's mumps and measles, and hooping-coughs, 
and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health 
or prescribe the cure. A simple mind will not know these ene- 
mies. It is quite another thing that he should be able to give 
account of his faith, and expound to auother the theory of his 
self-union and freedom. This requires rare gifts. Yet without 
this self-knowledge there may be a sylvan strength and integrity 
in that which he is. " A few strong instincts and a few plain 
rules" suffice us. 

My will never gave the images in my mind the rank they now 
take. The regular course of studies, the years of academical 
and professional education, have not yielded me better facts than 
some idle books under the bench at the Latin school. What we 
do not call education is more precious than that which we call 
so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of 
its comparative value. And education often wastes its efforts in 
attempts to thwart and baulk this natural magnetism which is 
sure to select what belongs to it. 

In like manner our moral nature is vitiated by any interference 
of our will. People represent virtue as a struggle, and take to 
themselves great airs upon their attainments, and the question 
is everywhere vexed, when a noble nature is commended, Whe- 
ther the man is not better who strives with temptation ? But 
there is no merit in the matter. Either God is there, or he is 
not there. We love characters in proportion as they are impul- 
sive and spontaneous. The less a man thinks or knows about 
his virtues, the better we like him. Timoleon's victories are the 
best victories ; which ran and flowed like Homer's verses, Plu- 
tarch said. When we see a soul whose acts are all regal, graceful, 
and pleasant as roses, we must thank God that such things can 
be and are, and not turn sourly on the angel, and say, " Crump 
is a better man with his grunting resistance to all his native 
devils." 

Not less conspicuous is the preponderance of nature over will 
in all practical life. There is less intention in history than we 
ascribe to it. We impute deep-laid, far-sighted plans to Caesar 
and Napoleon ; but the best of their power was in nature, not 
in them. Men of an extraordinary success, in their honest 
moments, have always sung, " Not unto us, not unto us." Ac- 
cording to the faith of their times, they have built altars to 
Fortune or to Destiny, or to St. Julian. Their success lay in 
their parallelism to the course of thought, which found in them 
an unobstructed channel ; and the wonders of which they were 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 67 

the visible conductors, seemed to the eye their deed. Did the 
wires generate the galvanism ? It is even true that there was 
less in them on which they could reflect, than in another ; as the 
virtue of a pipe is to be smooth and hollow. That which ex- 
ternally seemed will and immovableness, was willingness and 
self-annihilation. Could Shakspeare give a theory of Shaks- 
peare ? Could ever a man of prodigious mathematical genius 
convey to ethers any insight into his methods ? If he could 
communicate that secret, it would instantly lose all its exagger- 
ated value, blending with the daylight and the vital energy the 
power to stand and to go. 

The lesson is forcibly taught by these observations, that our 
life might be much easier and simpler than we make it ; that 
the world might be a happier place than it is ; that there is no 
need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of 
the hands and the gnashing of the teeth; that we miscreate 
our own evils. We interfere with the optimism of nature; for, 
whenever we get this vantage ground of the past, or of a 
wiser mind in the present, we are able to discern that we are 
begirt with laws which execute themselves. 

The face of external nature teaches the same lesson. Nature 
will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our bene- 
volence or our learniug, much better than she likes our frauds 
and wars. TV hen we come out of the caucus, or the bank, or 
the Abolition convention, or the Temperance meeting, or the 
Transcendental club, into the fields and woods, she savs to us, 
"So hot? my little sir." 

We are full of mechanical actions. We must needs inter- 
meddle, and have things in our own way, until the sacrifices and 
virtues of society are odious. Love should make joy ; but our 
benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday schools and churches and 
pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to 
please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving at the same 
ends at which these aim, but do not arrive. Why should all 
virtue work in one and the same way ? Why should all give 
dollars ? It is very inconvenient to us country folk, and we do 
not think any good will come of it. We have not dollars. 
Merchants have. Let them give them. Farmers will give 
corn. Poets will sing. Women will sew. Labourers will lend 
a hand. The children will bring flowers. And why drag this 
dead weight of a Sunday school over the whole Christendom? 
It is natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire, and 
maturity should teach ; but it is time enough to answer questions 
when they are asked. Do not shut up the young people against 



68 ESSAY IV. 

their will in a pew, and force the children to ask them questions 
for an hour against their will. 

If we look wider, things are all alike ; laws and letters, and 
creeds and modes of living, seem a travestie of truth. Our 
society is encumbered by ponderous machinery, which resembles 
the endless aqueducts which the Komans built over hill and 
dale, and which are superseded by the discovery of the law that 
water rises to the level of its source. It is a Chinese wall which 
any nimble Tartar can leap over. It is a standing army, not so 
good as a peace. It is a graduated, titled, richly-appointed 
Empire, quite superfluous when town-meetings are found to 
answer just as well. 

Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by 
short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls. When the fruit is 
despatched, the leaf falls. The circuit of the waters is mere 
falling. The walking of man and all animals is a falling for- 
ward. All our manual labour and works of strength, as prying, 
splitting, digging, rowing, and so forth, are done by dint of 
continual falling, and the globe, earth, moon, comet, sun, star, 
fall for ever and ever. 

The simplicity of the universe is very different from the sim- 
plicity of a machine. He who sees moral nature out and out, and 
thoroughly knows how knowledge is acquired and character 
formed, is a pedant. The simplicity of nature is not that which 
may easily be read, but is inexhaustible. The last analysis can 
nowise be made. We judge of a man's wisdom by his hope, 
knowing that the perception of the inexhaustibleness of nature 
is an immortal youth. The wild fertility of nature is felt in 
comparing our rigid names and reputations with our fluid con- 
sciousness. We pass in the world for sects and schools, for 
erudition and piety, and we are all the time jejune babes. One 
sees very well how Pyrrhonism grew up. Every man sees that 
he is that middle point whereof everything may be affirmed and 
denied with equal reason. He is old, he is young, he is very 
wise, he is altogether ignorant. He hears and feels what you 
say of the seraphim, and of the tin-pedlar. There is no per- 
manent wise man, except in the figment of the Stoics. We side 
with the hero, as we read or paint, against the coward and 
the robber ; but we have been ourselves that coward and robber, 
and shall be again, not in the low circumstance, but in compari- 
son with the grandeurs possible to the soul. 

A little consideration of what takes place around us every 
day, would show us that a higher law than that of our will 
regulates events; that our painful labours are unnecessary, 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 6y 

and altogether fruitless ; that only in our easy, simple, sponta- 
neous action are we strong, and, by contenting ourselves with 
obedience, we become divine. Belief and love, — a believing 
love will relieve us of a vast load of care. 0, my brothers, 
God exists. There is a soul at the centre of nature, and over 
the will of every man, so that none of us can wrong the uni- 
verse. It has so infused its strong enchantment into nature, 
that we prosper when we accept its advice, and when we struggle 
to wound its creatures, our hands are glued to our sides, or they 
beat our own breasts. The whole course of things goes to teach 
us faith. We need only obey. There is guidance for each of 
us, and by lowly listening we shall hear the right word. Why 
need you choose so painfully your place, and occupation, and 
associates, and modes of action, and of entertainment ? Cer- 
tainly there is a possible right for you, that precludes the need 
of balance and wilful election. For you there is a reality, a fit 
place and congenial duties. Place yourself in the middle of the 
stream of power and wisdom which animates all it floats ; and 
you are without effort impelled to truth, to right, and a perfect 
contentment. Then you put all gainsayers in the wrong. Then 
you are the world, the measure of right, of truth, of beauty. 
If we will not be marplots with our miserable interferences, the 
work, the society, letters, arts, science, religion of men, would 
go on far better than now, and the Heaven predicted from the 
beginning of the world, and still predicted from the bottom of 
the heart, would organize itself, as do now the rose, and the 
air, and the sun. 

I say, do not choose ; but that is a figure of speech by which 
I would distinguish what is commonly called choice among men, 
and which is a partial act, the choice of the hands, of the eyes, 
of the appetites, and not a whole act of the man. But that 
which I call right or goodness, is the choice of my constitution ; 
and that which I call heaven, and inwardly aspire after, is the 
state or circumstance desirable to my constitution; and the 
action which I in all my years tend to do, is the work for my fa- 
culties. We must hold a man amenable to reason for the choice 
of his daily craft or profession. It is not an excuse any longer 
for his deeds that they are the custom of his trade. What busi- 
ness has he with an evil trade ? Has he not a calling in his 
character ? 

Each man has his own vocation. The talent is the call. 
There is one direction in which all space is open to him. He 
has faculties silently inviting him thither to endless exertion. 
He is like a ship in a river ; he runs against obstructions on every 



70 ESSAY IV. 

side but one ; on that side, all obstruction is taken away, and 
he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea. 
This talent and this call depend on his organization, or the mode 
in which the general soul incarnates itself in him. He inclines 
to do something which is easy to him, and good when it is done, 
but which no other man can do. He has no rival. For the 
more truly he consults his own powers, the more difference will 
his work exhibit from the work of any other. His ambition is 
exactly proportioned to his powers. The height of the pinnacle 
is determined by the breadth of the base. Every man has this 
call of the power to do somewhat unique, and no man has any 
other call. The pretence that he has another call, a summons 
by name and personal election, and outward " signs that mark 
him extraordinary, and not in the roll of common men," is 
fanaticism, and betrays obtuseness to perceive that there is one 
mind in all the individuals, and no respect of persons therein,, 

By doing his work, he makes the need felt which he can supply, 
and creates the taste by which he is enjoyed. By doing his own 
work, he unfolds himself. It is the vice of our public speaking, 
that it has not abandonment. Somewhere, not only every orator 
but every man should let out all the length of all the reins ; 
should find or make a frank and hearty expression of what force 
and meaning is in him. The common experience is, that the 
man fits himself as well as he can to the customary details of 
that work or trade he falls into, and tends it as a dog turns 
a spit. Then is he a part of the machine he moves ; the man is 
lost. Until he can manage to communicate himself to others in 
his full stature and proportion, he does not yet find his vocation. 
He must find in that an outlet for his character, so that he 
may justify his work to their eyes. If the labour is trivial, let 
him, by his thinking and character, make it liberal. Whatever 
he knows and thinks, whatever in his apprehension is worth 
doing, that let him communicate, or men will never know and 
honour him aright. Foolish, whenever you take the meanness 
and formality of that thing you do, instead of converting it into 
the obedient spiracle of your character and aims. 

We like only such actions as have already long had the 
praise of men, and do not perceive that anything man can do 
may be divinely done. We think greatness entailed or organized 
in some places or duties, in certain offices or occasions, and do 
not see that Paganini can extract rapture from a catgut, and 
Eulenstein from a Jew's harp, and a nimble-fingured lad out of 
shreds of paper with his scissors ; and Landseer out of swine, 
and the hero out of the pitiful habitation and company in winch 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 71 

he was hidden. What we call obscure condition or vulgar so- 
ciety, is that condition and society whose poetry is not yet 
written, but which you shall presently make as enviable and re- 
nowned as any. In our estimates, let us take a lesson from 
kiugs. The parts of hospitality, the connexion of families, the 
impressiveness of death, and a thousand other things, royalty 
makes its own estimate of, and a royal mind will. To make 
habitually a new estimate — that is elevation. 

What a man does, that he has. What has he to do with hope 
or fear ? In himself is his might. Let him regard no good as 
solid, but that which is in his nature, and which must grow 
out of him as long as he exists. The goods of fortune may 
come and go like summer leaves ; let him scatter them on every 
wind as the momentary signs of his infinite productiveness. 

He may have his own. A man's genius, the quality that 
differences him from every other, the susceptibility to one class 
of influences, the selection of what is fit for him, the rejection of 
what is unfit, determines for him the character of the universe. 
A man is a method, a progressive arrangement ; a selecting 
principle, gathering his like to him wherever he goes. He takes 
only his own, out of the multiplicity that sweeps and circles 
round him. He is like one of those booms which are set out 
from the shore on rivers to catch drift-wood, or like the load- 
stone amongst splinters of steel. 

Those facts, words, persons, which dwell in his memory with- 
out his being able to say why, remain, because they have a re- 
lation to him not less real for being as yet unapprehended. 
They are symbols of value to him, as they can interpret parts of 
his consciousness which he would vainly seek words for in the 
conventional images of books and other minds. What attracts 
my attention shall have it, as I will go to the man who knocks 
at my door, whilst a thousand persons, as worthy, go by it, to 
whom I give no regard. It is enough that these particulars 
speak to me. A few anecdotes, a few traits of character, man- 
ners, face, a few incidents, have an emphasis in your memory out 
of all proportion to their apparent significance, if you measure* 
them by the ordinary standards. They relate to your gift. Let 
them have their weight, and do not reject them and cast about 
for illustration and facts more usual in literature. What your 
heart thinks great is great. The soul's emphasis is always right. 

Over all things that are agreeable to his nature and genius, 
the man has the highest right. Everywhere he may take what 
belongs to his spiritual estate, nor can he take anything else, 
though all doors were open, nor can all the force of men hinder 



72 ESSAY IV. 

him from taking- so much. It is vain to attempt to keep a secret 
from one who has a right to know it. Tt will tell itself. That 
mood into which a friend can bring us, is his dominion over us. 
To the thoughts of that state of mind he has a right. All the 
secrets of that state of mind he can compel. This is a law which 
statesmen use in practice. All the terrors of the Trench Be- 
public, which held Austria in awe, were unable to command her 
diplomacy. But Napoleon sent to Yienna M. de Narbonne, one 
of the old noblesse, with the morals, manners, and name of that 
interest, saying, that it was indispensable to send to the old 
aristocracy of Europe, men of the same connexion, which, in 
fact, constitutes a sort of freemasonry. M. de Narbonne, in less 
than a fortnight, penetrated all the secrets of the imperial 
cabinet. 

Nothing seems so easy as to speak and to be understood. 
Yet a man may come to find that the strongest of defences and 
of ties, — that he has been understood ; and he who has received 
an opinion may come to find it the most inconvenient of bonds. 

If a teacher have any opinion which he wishes to conceal, his 
pupils will become as fully indoctrinated into that as into any 
which he publishes. If you pour water into a vessel twisted 
into coils and angles, it is vain to say, I will pour it only into 
this or that ; — it will find its level in all. Men feel and act the 
consequences of your doctrine, without being able to show how 
they follow. Show us an arc of the curve, and a good mathe- 
matician will find out the whole figure. We are always reason- 
ing from the seen to the unseen. Hence the perfect intelligence 
that subsists between wise men of remote ages. A man cannot 
bury his meanings so deep in his book, but time and like- 
minded men will find them. Plato had a secret doctrine, had 
he ? What secret can he conceal from the eyes of Bacon ? of 
Montaigne ? of Kant ? Therefore, Aristotle said of his works, 
"They are published and not published/' 

No man can learn what he has not preparation for learning, 
however near to his eyes is the object. A chemist may tell 
"his most precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall be never 
the wiser, — the secrets he would not utter to a chemist for an 
estate. Grod screens us evermore from premature ideas. Our 
eyes are holden that we cannot see things that stare us in the 
face, until the hour arrives when the mind is ripened ; then we 
behold them, and the time when we saw them not is like a 
dream. 

Not in nature, but in man, is all the beauty and worth he 
sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 73 

exalting soul for all its pride. " Earth fills her lap with splen- 
dors'' not her own. The vale of Tempe, Tivoli, and Rome, are 
earth and water, rocks and sky. There are as good earth 
and water in a thousand places, yet how unaffecting ! 

People are not the better for the sun and moon, the horizon 
and the trees ; as it is not observed that the keepers of Roman 
galleries, or the valets of painters, have any elevation of thought, 
or that librarians are wiser men than others. There are graces 
in the demeanour of a polished and noble person, which are 
lost upon the eye of a churl. These are like the stars whose 
light has not yet reached us. 

He may see what he maketh. Our dreams are the sequel of 
our waking knowledge. The visions of the night bear some 
proportion to the visions of the day. Hideous dreams are ex- 
aggerations of the sins of the day. We see our evil affections 
embodied in bad physiognomies. On the Alps, the traveller 
sometimes beholds his own shadow magnified to a giant, so that 
every gesture of his hand is terrific. "My children," said an 
old man to his boys scared by a figure in the dark entry, " my 
children, you will never see any thing worse than yourselves." 
As in dreams, so in the scarcely less fluid events of the world, 
every man sees himself in colossal, without knowing that it is 
himself. The good, compared to the evil which he sees, is as 
his own good to his own evil. Every quality of his mind is 
magnified in some one acquaintance, and every emotion of his 
heart in some one. He is like a quincunx of trees, which counts 
five, east, west, north, or south; or, an initial, medial, and ter- 
minal acrostic. And why not ? He cleaves to one person, 
and avoids another, according to their likeness or unlikeness to 
himself, truly seeking himself in his associates, and moreover in 
his trade, and habits, and gestures, and meats, and drinks ; 
and comes at last to be faithfully represented by every view you 
take of his circumstances. 

He may read what he writes. What can we see or acquire, but 
what we are ? You have observed a skilful man reading Virgil. 
Well, that author is a thousand books to a thousand persons. 
Take the book into your two hands, and read your eyes out ; 
you will never find what I find. If any ingenious reader would 
have a monopoly of the wisdom or delight he gets, he is as 
secure now the book is Englished, as if it were imprisoned in 
the Pelews' tongue. It is with a good book as it is with good 
company. Introduce a base person a mono- gentlemen : it is all 
to no purpose : he is not their fellow. Every society protects 

E 



74 ESSAY IV. 

itself. The company is perfectly safe, and he is not one of 
them, though his body is in the room. 

What avails it to fight with the eternal laws of mind, which 
adjust the relation of all persons to each other, by the mathe- 
matical measure of their havings and beings? Gertrude is 
enamoured of Guy ; how high, how aristocratic, how Eoman his 
mien and manners ! to live with him were life indeed, and no 
purchase is too great ; and heaven and earth are moved to that 
end. Well, Gertrude has Guy ; but what now avails how high, 
how aristocratic, how Eoman his mien and manners, if his heart 
and aims are in the senate, in the theatre, and in the billiard- 
room, and she has no aims, no conversation, that can enchant her 
graceful lord ? 

He shall have his own society. We can love nothing but 
nature. The most wonderful talents, the most meritorious ex- 
ertions, really avail very little with us ; but nearness or likeness 
of nature, — how beautiful is the ease of its victory ! Persons 
approach us famous for their beauty, for their accomplishments, 
worthy of all wonder for their charms and gifts : they dedicate 
their whole skill to the hour and the company ; with very im- 
perfect result. To be sure it would be ungrateful in us not 
to praise them loudly. Then, when all is done, a person of 
related mind, a brother or sister by nature, comes to us so softly 
and easily, so nearly and intimately, as if it were the blood in 
our proper veins, that we feel as if some one was gone, instead 
of another having come : we are utterly relieved and refreshed : 
it is a sort of joyful solitude. W^e foolishly think, in our days 
of sin, that we must court friends by compliance to the customs 
of society, to its dress, its breeding, and its estimates. But 
only that soul can be my friend, which I encounter on the 
line of my own march ; that soul to which I do not decline, 
and which does not decline to me, but, native of the same 
celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience. The 
scholar forgets himself, and apes the customs and costumes 
of the man of the world, to deserve the smile of beauty, and 
follows some giddy girl, not yet taught by religious passion 
to know the noble woman with all that is serene, oracular, 
and beautiful in her soul. Let him be great, and love 
shall follow him. Nothing is more deeply punished than 
the neglect of the affinities by which alone society should 
be formed, and the insane levity of choosing associates by 
ethers' eyes. 

He may set his own rate. It is a maxim worthy of all 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 75 

acceptation, that a man may have that allowance he takes. 
Take the place and attitude which belong to yon, and all men 
acquiesce. The world must be just. It leaves every man 
with profound unconcern to set his own rate. Hero or drivel- 
ler, it meddles not in the matter. It will certainly accept 
your own measure of your doing and being, whether you sneak 
about and deny your own name, or whether you see your work 
produced to the concave sphere of the heavens, one with the 
revolution of the stars. 

The same reality pervades all teaching. The man may teach 
by doing, and not otherwise. If he can communicate himself, 
he can teach, but not by words. He teaches who gives, and he 
learns who receives. There is no teaching until the pupil is 
brought into the same state or principle in which you are ; a 
transfusion takes place : he is you, and you are he ; then is a 
teaching, and by no unfriendly chance or bad company can he 
ever quite lose the benefit. But your propositions run out of 
one ear as they ran in at the other. We see it advertised that 
Mr. Grand will deliver an oration on the Fourth of July, and 
Mr. Hand before the Mechanics 5 Association, and we do not go 
thither, because we know that these gentlemen will not commu- 
nicate their own character and experience to the company. If we 
had reason to expect such a confidence, we should go through 
all inconvenience and opposition. The sick would be carried in 
litters. But a public oration is an escapade, a non-committal, 
an apology, a gag, and not a communication, not a speech, not 
a man. 

A like Nemesis presides over all intellectual works. We have 
yet to learn that the thing uttered in words is not therefore 
affirmed. It must affirm itself, or no forms of logic or of oath 
can give it evidence. The sentence must also contain its own 
apology for being spoken. 

The effect of any writing on the public mind is mathemati- 
cally measurable by its depth of thought. How much water 
does it draw ? If it awaken you to think ; if it lift you from 
your feet with the great voice of eloquence ; then the effect is 
to be wide, slow, permanent, over the minds of men : if the 
pages instruct you not, they will die like flies in the hour. The 
way to speak and write what shall not go out of fashion, is, to 
speak and write sincerely. The argument which has not power 
to reach my own practice, I may well doubt will fail to reach 
yours. But take Sidney's maxim : " Look in thy heart, and 
write/' He that writes to himself, writes to an eternal public. 
That statement only is fit to be made public which you have 

e 2 



76 ESSAY IV. 

come at in attempting to satisfy your own curiosity. The writer 
who takes his subject from his ear and not from his heart, 
should know that he has lost as much as he seems to have gained, 
and when the empty book has gathered all its praise, and half 
the people say — " What poetry ! what genius !" it still needs 
fuel to make fire. That only profits which is profitable. Life 
alone can impart life ; and though we should burst, we can only 
be valued as we make ourselves valuable. There is no luck in 
literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon 
every book, are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour 
when it appears ; but a court as of angels, a public not to be 
bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides 
upon every man's title to fame. Only those books come down 
which deserve to last. Gilt edges, vellum, and morocco, 
and presentation-copies to all the libraries, will not preserve 
a book in circulation beyond its intrinsic date. It must 
go with all Walpole's Noble and Eoyal Authors to its fate. 
Blackmore, Kotzebue, or Pollok, may endure for a night ; but 
Moses and Homer stand for ever. There are not in the world 
at any one time more than a dozen persons who read and under- 
stand Plato : — never enough to pay for an edition of his works ; 
yet to every generation these come duly down, for the sake of 
those few persons, as if God brought them in his hand. " No 
book," said Bentley, " was ever written down by any but itself." 
The permanence of all books is fixed by no effort friendly or 
hostile, but by their own specific gravity, or the intrinsic im- 
portance of their contents to the constant mind of man. " Do 
not trouble yourself too much about the light on your statue," 
said Michael Angelo to the young sculptor ; " the light of the 
public square will test its value." 

In like manner the effect of every action is measured by the 
depth of the sentiment from which it proceeds. The great man 
knew not that he was great. It took a century or two for that 
fact to appear. What he did, he did because he must : it was 
the most natural thing in the world, and grew out of the 
circumstances of the moment. But now, everything he did, 
even to the lifting of his finger, or the eating of bread, looks 
large, all-related, and is called an institution. 

These are the demonstrations in a few particulars of the genius 
of nature : they show the direction of the stream. But the 
stream is blood : every drop is alive. Truth has not single 
victories : all things are its organs, not only dust and stories, 
but errors and lies. The laws of disease, physicians say, are as 
beautiful as the laws of health. Our philosophy is affirmative, 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 7? 

and readily accepts the testimony of negative facts, as even- 
shadow points to the sun. By a divine necessity, every fact in 
nature is constrained to offer its testimony. 

Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugi- 
tive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated 
purpose, expresses character. If you act, you show character ; 
if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it. You think, because 
you spoke nothing when others spoke, and have given no opinion 
on the times, on the church, on slavery, on marriage, on social- 
ism, on secret societies, on the college, on parties and persons, 
that your verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved 
wisdom. Far otherwise ; your silence answers very loud. You 
have no oracle to utter, and your fellow-men have learned that 
you cannot help them ; for, oracles speak. Doth not wisdom 
cry, and understanding put forth her voice ? 

Dreadful limits are set in nature to the powers of dissimula- 
tion. Truth tyrannizes over the unwilling members of the 
body. Paces never lie, it is said. Xo man need be deceived, 
who will study the changes of expression. TThen a man speaks 
the truth in the spirit of truth, his eye is as clear as the heavens. 
"When he has base ends, and speaks falsely, the eye is muddy, 
and sometimes asquint. 

I have heard an experienced counsellor say, that he never 
feared the effect upon a jury, of a lawyer who does not believe 
in his heart that his client ought to have a verdict. If he does 
not believe it, his unbelief will appear to the jury, despite all 
his protestations, and will become their unbelief. This is that 
law whereby a work of art, of whatever kind, sets us in the 
same state of mind wherein the artist was when he made it. 
That which we do not believe, we cannot adequately say, though 
we may repeat the words never so often. It was this conviction 
which Swedenborg expressed, when he described a group of 
persons in the spiritual world endeavouring in vain to articulate 
a proposition which they did not believe ; but they could not, 
though they twisted and folded their lips even to indignation. 

A man passes for that he is worth. Very idle is all curiosity 
concerning other people's estimate of us, and all fear of remain- 
ing unknown is not less so. If a man know that he can do any 
thing, — that he can do it better than any one else, — he has a 
pledge of the acknowledgment of that fact by all persons. The 
world is full of judgment-days, and into every assembly that a 
man enters, in every action he attempts, he is gauged and 
stamped. In every troop of boys that whoop and run in each 
yard and square, a new-comer is as well and accurately weighed 



7S ESSAY IV, 

in the course of a few days, and stamped with his right num- 
ber, as if he had undergone a formal trial of his strength, speed, 
and temper. A stranger comes from a distant school, with 
better dress, with trinkets in his pockets, with airs and preten- 
sions : an older boy says to himself, ' It 's of no use ; we shall 
find him out to-morrow.' ' What has he done?' is the divine 
question which searches men, and transpierces every false repu- 
tation. A fop may sit in any chair of the world, nor be distin- 
guished for his hour from Homer and Washington ; but there 
need never be any doubt concerning the respective ability 
of human beings. Pretension may sit still, but cannot act. 
Pretension never feigned an act of real greatness. Pretension 
never wrote an Iliad, nor drove back Xerxes, nor christianized 
the world, nor abolished slavery. 

As much virtue as there is, so much appears ; as much good- 
ness as there is, so much reverence it commands. All the 
devils respect virtue. The high, the generous, the self-devoted 
sect will always instruct and command mankind. Never was 
a sincere word utterly lost. Never a magnanimity fell to the 
ground, but there is some heart to greet and accept it unex- 
pectedly. A man passes for that he is worth. What he 
is engraves itself on his face, on his form, on his fortunes, in 
letters of light. Concealment avails him nothing ; boasting 
nothing. There is confession in the glances of our eyes ; in 
our smiles ; in salutations ; and the grasp of hands. His 
sin bedaubs him, mars all his good impression. Men know 
not why they do not trust him ; but they do not trust him ; 
His vice glasses his eye, cuts lines of mean expression in his cheek, 
pinches the nose, sets the mark of the beast on the back of the 
head, and writes, O fool ! fool ! on the forehead of a king. 

If you would not be known to do any thing, never do it. A 
man may play the fool in the drifts of a desert, but every grain 
of sand shall seem to see. He may be a solitary eater, but he 
cannot keep his foolish counsel. A broken complexion, a 
swinish look, ungenerous acts, and the want of due knowledge, 
— all blab. Can a cook, a Chiffinch, an Iachimo, be mistaken 
for Zeno or Paul ? Confucius exclaimed, — " How can a man 
be concealed ! How can a man be concealed ! " 

On the other hand, the hero fears not, that, if he withhold 
the avowal of a just and brave act, it will go unwitnessed and 
unloved. One knows it, — himself, — and is pledged by it to 
sweetness of peace, and to nobleness of aim, which will prove 
in the end a better proclamation of it than the relating of the 
incident. Virtue is the adherence in action to the nature 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 79 

of things, and the nature of things makes it prevalent. It con- 
sists in a perpetual substitution of being for seeming, and with 
sublime propriety God is described as saying, I AM. 

The lesson which these observations convey is, Be, and not 
seem. Let us acquiesce. Let us take our bloated nothingness 
out of the path of the divine circuits. Let us unlearn our 
wisdom of the world. Let us lie low in the Lord's power, and 
learn that truth alone makes rich and great. 

If you visit your friend, why need you apologize for having 
not visited him, and waste his time and deface your own act ? 
Visit him now. Let him feel that the highest love has come to 
see him, in thee, its lowest organ. Or why need you torment 
yourself and friend by secret self-reproaches that you have not 
assisted him or complimented him with gifts and salutations 
heretofore ? Be a gift and a benediction. Shine with real 
light, and not with the borrowed reflection of gifts. Common 
men are apologies for men ; they bow the head, excuse them- 
selves with prolix reasons, and accumulate appearances, because 
the substance is not. 

TVe are full of these superstitions of sense, the worship of 
magnitude. We call the poet inactive, because he is not a pre- 
sident, a merchant, or a porter. "We adore an institution, and 
do not see that it is founded on a thought which we have. But 
real action is in silent moments. The epochs of our life are 
not in the visible facts of our choice of a calling, our marriage, 
our acquisition of an office, and the like, but in a silent thought 
by the way- side as we walk ; in a thought which revises our 
entire manner of life, and says, — ' Thus hast thou done, but it 
were better thus. 5 And all our after years, like menials, serve 
and wait on this, and, according to their ability, execute 
its will. This revisal or correction is a constant force, which, 
as a tendency, reaches through our lifetime. The object of the 
man, the aim of these moments, is to make daylight shine 
through him, to suffer the law to traverse his whole being with- 
out obstruction, so that, on what point soever of his doing your 
eye falls, it shall report truly of his character, whether it be his 
diet, his house, his religious forms, his society, Ms mirth, his 
vote, his opposition. Now he is not homogeneous, but hetero- 
geneous, and the ray does not traverse ; there are no thorough 
lights : but the eye of the beholder is puzzled, detecting many 
unlike tendencies, and a life not yet at one. 

Why should we make it a point with our false modesty to 
disparage that man we are, and that form of being assigned to 
us ? A good man is contented. I love and honour Epaminon- 
das, but I do not wish to be Epaminondas. I hold it more just 



80 ' ESSAY IV. 

to love the world of this hour, than the world of his hour. Nor 
can you, if I am true, excite me to the least uneasiness, by say- 
ing, c He acted, and thou sittest still.' I see action to be good, 
when the need is, and sitting still to be also good. Epaminon- 
das, if he was the man I take him for, would have sat still with 
joy and peace, if his lot had been mine. Heaven is large, and 
affords space for all modes of love and fortitude. Why should 
we be busybodies and superservieeable ? Action and inaction 
are alike to the true. One piece of the tree is cut for a wea- 
thercock, and one for the sleeper of a bridge ; the virtue of the 
wood is apparent in both. 

I desire not to disgrace the soul. The fact that I am here 
certainly shows me that the soul had need of an organ here. 
Shall I not assume the post ? Shall I skulk, and dodge, and 
duck with my unseasonable apologies and vain modesty, and 
imagine my being heie impertinent ? less pertinent than Epa- 
minondas or Homer being there ? and that the soul did not know 
its own needs ? Besides, without any reasoning on the matter, 
I have no discontent. The good soul nourishes me, and unlocks 
new magazines of power and enjoyment to me every day. I 
will not meanly decline the immensity of good, because I have 
heard that it has come to others in another shape. 

Besides, why should we be cowed by the name of Action ? 
'T is a trick of the senses, — no more. We know that the an- 
cestor of every action is a thought. The poor mind does not 
seem to itself to be any thing, unless it have an outside badge, 
— some Gentoo diet, or Quaker coat, or Calvinistic prayer- 
meeting, or philanthropic society, or a great donation, or a high 
office, or, any how, some wild contrasting action to testify that 
it is somewhat. The rich mind lies in the sun and sleeps, and 
is Nature. To think is to act. 

Let us, if we must have great actions, make our own so. All 
action is of an infinite elasticity, and the least admits of being 
inflated with the celestial air until it eclipses the sun and moon. 
Let us seek one peace by fidelity. Let me heed my duties. 
Why need I go gadding into the scenes and philosophy of Greek 
and Italian history, before I have justified myself to my bene- 
factors ? How dare I read Washington's campaigns, when I 
have not answered the letters of my own correspondents ? Is 
not that a just objection to much of our reading ? It is a 
pusillanimous desertion of our work to gaze after our neigh- 
bours. It is peeping. Byron says of Jack Bunting, — 

He kne^v not what to say, and so he swore. 

I may say it of our preposterous use of books, — He knew not 



SPIRITUAL LAWS. 81 

what to do, and so lie read. I can think of nothing to fill my 
time with, and I find the Life of Brant. It is a very extravagant 
compliment to pay to Brant, or to General Schuyler, or to 
General Washington. My time should be as good as their 
time — my facts, my net of relations as good as theirs, 
or either of theirs. Bather let me do my work so well that 
other idlers, if they choose, may compare my texture with the 
texture of these, and find it identical with the best. 

This over-estimate of the possibilities of Paul and Pericles, 
this under-estimate of our own, comes from a neglect of the fact 
of an identical nature. Bonaparte knew but one merit, and 
rewarded in one and the same way the good soldier, the good 
astronomer, the good poet, the good player. The poet uses the 
names of Caesar, of Tamerlane, of Bonduca, of Belisarius ; the 
painter uses the conventional story of the Virgin Mary, of Paul, 
of Peter. He does not, therefore, defer to the nature of these 
accidental men, of these stock heroes. If the poet write a true 
drama, then he is Caesar, and not the player of Csesar ; then the 
self-same strain of thought, emotion as pure, wit as subtle, 
motions as swift, mounting, extravagant, and a heart as great, 
self-sufficing, dauntless, which on the waves of its love and 
hope can uplift all that is reckoned solid and precious in the 
world, — palaces, gardens, money, navies, kingdoms, — marking 
its own incomparable worth by the slight it casts on these 
gauds of men, — these all are his, and by the power of these he 
rouses the nations. Let a man believe in God, and not in 
names, and places, and persons. Let the great soul incarnated 
in some woman's form, poor, and sad, and single, in some 
Dolly or Joan, go out to service, and sweep chambers and scour 
floors, and its effulgent daybeams cannot be muffled or hid, but 
to sweep and scour will instantly appear supreme and beautiful 
actions, the top and radiance of human life, and all people will 
get mops and brooms ; until, lo ! suddenly the great soul has 
enshrined itself in some other form, and done some other deed, 
and that is now the flower and head of all living nature. 

TVe are the photometers, we the irritable goldleaf and tinfoil 
that measure the accumulations of the subtle element. We 
know the authentic effects of the true fire through every one of 
its million disguises. 



e 3 



L V E. 



I was as a gem concealed ; 
Me my burning ray revealed. 

Koran. 



ESSAY V. 

LOYE. 



Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments ; each 
of its joys ripens into a new want. Nature, uncontainable, 
flowing, fore-looking, in the first sentiment of kindness antici- 
pates already a benevolence which shall lose all particular 
regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is 
in a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the 
enchantment of human life ; which, like a certain divine rage 
and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period, and works a revo- 
lution in his mind and body ; unites him to his race, pledges 
him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new 
sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens 
the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attri- 
butes, establishes marriage, and gives permanence to human 
society. 

The natural association of the sentiment of love with the 
heyday of the blood seems to require, that in order to portray it 
in vivid tints, which every youth and maid should confess to be 
true to their throbbing experience, one must not be too old. 
The delicious fancies of youth reject the least savour of a mature 
philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their purple 
bloom. And, therefore, I know I incur the imputation of un- 
necessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose the 
Court and Parliament of Love. But from these formidable 
censors I shall appeal to my seniors. Eor it is to be considered 
that this passion of which we speak, though it begin with the 
young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather suffers no one who is 
truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators 
of it, not less than the tender maiden, though in a different and 



86 ESSAY V. 

nobler sort. For it is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the 
narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark 
out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms 
and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the univer- 
sal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature 
with its generous flames. It matters not, therefore, whether 
we attempt to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at 
eighty years. He who paints it at the first period will lose 
some of its later, he who paints it at the last, some of its earlier 
traits. Only it is to be hoped that, by patience and the Muses' 
aid, we may attain to that inward view of the law, which shall 
describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it 
shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle beholden. 

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and 
lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it ap- 
peared in hope, and not in history. For each man sees his own 
life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man is not, to his 
imagination. Each man sees over his own experience a certain 
stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. 
Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the 
beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction 
and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas ! I know not 
why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the re- 
membrances of budding joy, and cover every beloved name. 
Every thing is beautiful, seen from the point of the intellect, or 
as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are 
melancholy ; the plan is seemly and noble. In the actual world 
—the painful kingdom of time and place — dwell care, and 
canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal 
hilarity, the rose of joy. Eound it all the Muses sing. But 
grief clings to names, and persons, and the partial interests of 
to-day and yesterday. 

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which 
this topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation of 
society. What do we wish to know of any worthy person so 
much, as how he has sped in the history of this sentiment ? 
What books in the circulating library circulate ? How we glow 
over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any 
spark of truth and nature ! And what fastens attention, in 
the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection be- 
tween two parties ? Perhaps we never saw them before, and 
never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a 
glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. 
We understand them, and take the warmest interest in the de- 






LOVE. 87 

velopment of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The 
earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature's 
most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and grace in 
the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls 
about the school-house door ; — but to-day he comes running 
into the entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel; 
he holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him 
as if she removed herself from him infinitely, and was a 
sacred precinct. Among the throng of girls he runs rudely 
enough, but one alone distances him ; and these two little neigh- 
bours, that were so close just now, have learned to respect each 
other's personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the en- 
gaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls, who go into 
the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and 
talk half-an-hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good- 
natured shop-boy ? In the village they are on a perfect equality, 
which love delights in, and without any coquetry, the happy, 
affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. 
The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish 
between them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding 
relations, what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar, 
and Jonas, and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and 
who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school 
would begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties 
cooed. By-and-bye that boy wants a wife, and very truly and 
heartily will he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate, 
without any risk, such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars 
and great men. 

I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my 
reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the per- 
sonal relations. But now I almost shrink at the remembrance 
of such disparaging words. Tor persons are love's world, and 
the coldest philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young 
soul wandering here in nature to the power of love, without 
being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught deroga- 
tory to the social instincts. For, though the celestial rapture 
falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and 
although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison, and 
putting us quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after thirty 
years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other 
remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. 
But here is a strange fact ; it may seem to many men, in re- 
vising their experience, that they have no fairer page in their 
life's book than the delicious memory of some passages wherein 



88 ESSAY V. 

affection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing the deep at- 
traction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental and trivial 
circumstances. In looking backward, they may find that seve- 
ral things which were not the charm have more reality to this 
groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. 
But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever 
forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which 
created all things new ; which was the dawn in him of music, 
poetry, and art ; which made the face of nature radiant with 
purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments ; 
when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, 
and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is 
put in the amber of memory ; when he became all eye when one 
was present, and all memory when one was gone ; when the 
youth becomes a watcher of windows, and studious of a glove, a 
veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage ; when no place is too 
solitary, and none too silent, for him who has richer company 
and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts, than any old 
friends, though best and purest, can give him ; for the figures, 
the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other 
images, written in water, but, as Plutarch said, " enamelled in 
fire," and make the study of midnight. 

Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art, 

Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart. 

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recol- 
lection of days when happiness was not happ}& enough, but must 
be 'drugged with the relish of pain and fear ; for he touched the 
secret of the matter, who said of love,- — 

All other pleasures are not worth its pains ; 

and when the day was not long enough, but the night, too, must 
be consumed in keen recollections ; when the head boiled all 
night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on ; when 
the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, 
and the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song ; when 
all business seemed an impertinence, and all the men and women 
running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures. 

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all 
things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every 
bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. 
The notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he 
looks on them. The trees of the forest, the waving grass, and 
the peeping flowers have grown intelligent ; and he almost fears 



LOVE. 89 

to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite. Yet 
nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds 
a dearer home than with men. 

Fountain-heads and pathless groves, 
Places which pale passion loves, 
Moonlight walks, when all the fowls 
Are safely housed, save bats and owls, 
A midnight bell, a passing groan, — 
These are the sounds we feed upon. 

Behold there in the wood the fine madman ! He is a palace 
of sweet sounds and sights ; he dilates ; he is twice a man ; he 
walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass 
and the trees ; he feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and 
the lily in his veins ; and he talks with the brook that wets his 
foot. 

The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty, 
have made him love music and verse. It is a fact often observed, 
that men have written good verses under the inspiration of pas- 
sion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances. 

The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands 
the sentiment ; it makes the clown gentle, and gives the coward 
heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and 
courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the 
beloved object. In giving him to another, it still more gives 
him to himself. He is a new man, with new perceptions, new 
and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and 
aims. He does not longer appertain to his family and society ; 
lie is somewhat ; lie is a person ; lie is a soul. 

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that in- 
fluence which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, 
whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun 
wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it 
and with themselves, seems sufficient to itself. The lover cannot 
paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in 
flower, so much soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for 
itself, and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with 
Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence makes 
the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his 
attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carry- 
ing out her owu being into somewhat impersonal, large, mun- 
dane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all 
select things and virtues. Tor that reason, the lover never sees 



90 ESSAY V. 

personal resemblances in his mistress to her kindred or to others. 
His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, 
or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance 
except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows 
and the song of birds. 

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can 
analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another 
face and form ? We are touched with emotions of tenderness 
and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emo- 
tion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the ima- 
gination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does 
it point to any relations of friendship or love known and 
described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and 
unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendant delicacy and 
sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We 
cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck 
lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most 
excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying 
all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul 
Eichter signify, when he said to music, tc Away ! away ! thou 
speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not 
found, and shall not find." The same fluency may be observed 
in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful 
when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of 
criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring- 
wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to 
say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the 
sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which 
is representable to the senses, to that which is not. Then first 
it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. 
And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satis- 
fies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours 
after the unattainable. Concerning it, Landor inquires " whether 
it is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and 
existence." 

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and 
itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end ; when it becomes a 
story without an end ; when it suggests gleams and visions, 
and not earthly satisfactions ; when it makes the beholder feel 
his un worthiness ; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he 
were Csesar ; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firma- 
ment, and the splendours of a sunset. 

Hence arose the saying, " If I love you, what is that to you ? " 



LOVE. 91 

We say so, because we feel that what we love is not in your will, 
but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that 
which you know not in yourself, and can never know. 

This agrees well with, that high philosophy of Beauty which 
the ancient writers delighted in ; for they said that the soul of 
man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in 
quest of that other world of its own, out of which it came into 
this, but was soon stupified by the light of the natural sun, and 
unable to see any other objects than those of this world, which 
are but shadows of real things. Therefore, the Deity sends the 
glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful 
bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial, good, and fair ; 
and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to 
her, and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, move- 
ment, and intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him 
the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty, and the 
cause of the beauty. 

If, however, from too much conversing with material objects, 
the soul was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, 
it reaped nothing but sorrow ; body being unable to fulfil the 
promise which beauty holds out ; but if, accepting the hint of 
these visions and suggestions which beauty makes to bis mind, 
the soul passes through the body, and falls to admire strokes of 
character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their dis- 
courses and their actions, then they pass to the true palace of 
beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and by this love 
extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by 
shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By con- 
versation with that which is itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, 
and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, 
and a quicker apprehension of them. Then lie passes from 
loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one 
beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the 
society of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of 
his mate, he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint, which 
her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to point 
it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now able, without 
offence, to indicate blemishes and hindrances in each other, and 
give to each all help and comfort in curing the same. And, 
beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and 
separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint which 
it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest 
beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on 
this ladder of created souls. 



92 ESSAY Y. 

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all 
ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plu- 
tarch, and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo, and 
Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke 
to that subterranean prudence which presides at marriages with 
words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is 
prowling in the cellar, so that its gravest discourse has a savor 
of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when this sensualism in- 
trudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope 
and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage sig- 
nifies nothing but a housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has 
no other aim. 

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene 
in our play. In the procession of the soul from within out- 
ward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into 
the pond, or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the 
soul alight first on things nearest, on every utensil and toy, on 
nurses and domestics, on the house, and yard, and passengers, 
on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics, and geo- 
graphy, and history. But things are ever grouping themselves 
according to higher or more interior laws. Neighbourhood, 
size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over 
us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony 
between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive, ideali- 
zing instinct, predominate later, and the step backward from 
the higher to the lower relations is impossible. Thus, even 
love, which is the deification of persons, must become more im- 
personal every day. Of this, at first, it gives no hint. Little 
think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other 
across crowded rooms, with eyes so full of mutual intelligence, 
of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, 
quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first 
in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. Prom exchanging 
glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to 
fiery passion, to plighting troth, and marriage. Passion beholds 
its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and 
the body is wholly ensouled. 

Her pure and eloquent blood 

Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought, 

That one might almost say her body thought. 

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the 
heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no 
more, than Juliet, — than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, 



LOVE. 93 

kingdoms, religion, are all contained in this form full of soul, 
in this soul which is all form. The lovers delight in endear- 
ments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. 
When alone, they solace themselves with the remembered image 
of the other. Does that other see the same star, the same melt- 
ing cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now 
delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and, adding 
up costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in 
discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a 
ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of 
which shall be harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these 
children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to all. 
Love prays. It makes covenants with Eternal Power in behalf 
of this dear mate. The union which is thus effected, and which 
adds a new value to every atom in nature, for it transmutes 
every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a golden 
ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element, is yet a 
temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, pro- 
testations, not even home in another heart, content the awful 
soul that dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these 
endearments, as toys, and puts on the harness, and aspires to 
vast and universal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, 
craving a perfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and 
disproportion in the behaviour of the other. Hence arise sur- 
prise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that which drew them to 
each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue ; and these 
virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and re-appear, 
and continue to attract ; but the regard changes, quits the sign, 
and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affec- 
tion. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permuta- 
tion and combination of all possible positions of the parties, 
to employ all the resources of each, and acquaint each with the 
strength and weakness of the other. Tor it is the nature and end 
of this relation, that they should represent the human race to 
each other. All that is in the world, which is or ought to be 
known, is cunningly wrought into the texture of man, of woman. 

The person love does to us fit, 

Like manna, has the taste of all in it. 

The world rolls ; the circumstances vary every hour. The 
angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the win- 
dows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they 
are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; 
they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by 



94 essay y. 

time in either breast, and, losing in violence what it gains in 
extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign 
each other, without complaint, to the good offices which man 
and woman are severally appointed to discharge in time, and 
exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its ob- 
ject, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or 
absent, of each other's designs. At last they discover that all 
which at first drew them together, — those once sacred features, 
that magical play of charms, — was deciduous, had a prospective 
end, like the scaffolding by which the house was built ; and the 
purification of the intellect and the heart, from year to year, is 
the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and 
wholly above their consciousness. Looking at these aims with 
which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and cor- 
relatively gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial 
society forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis 
with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early infancy, 
at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial 
bower, and nature, and intellect, and art emulate each other in 
the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium. 

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, 
nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom 
everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We 
are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our per- 
manent state. But we are often made to feel that our affections 
are but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, the 
objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. 
There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the 
man, and make his happiness dependent on a. person or persons. 
But in health the mind is presently seen again, — its overarching 
vault, bright with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm 
loves and fears that swept over us as clouds, must lose their 
finite character and blend with God, to attain their own perfec- 
tion. But we need not fear that we can lose any thing by the 
progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to the end. 
That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations must 
be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, 
and so on for ever. 



FKIEXBSHIP. 



A ruddy drop of manly blood 

The surging sea outweighs. 

The world uncertain comes and goes. 

The love: r; »ted stays. 

I fancied he was fledj 

And, a::er many a year. 

Glowed unexhausted kindliness 

like daily sunrise there. 

. .- heart was free again. — 
friend, my bosom said. 
Through thee alone the sky is ?:: 
Through thee the rose is red, 
All things through thee z:\-ir m bier form, 
And look beyond the earth, 
And is the mill-round of our fate 
A sun-path in thy worth. 
Me too thy iias taught 

To master my despair : 
The fountains of my' hidden life 
Are through thy friend 



ESSAY VI. 

FRIENDSHIP. 



TVe have a great deal more kindness than is ever spoken. 
Maugre all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, 
the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a 
fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we 
scarcely speak to, whom yet we honour, and who honour us ! 
How many we see in the street, or sit with in church, whom, 
though silently, we warmly rejoice to be with ! Read the lan- 
guage of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth. 

The effect of the indulgence of this human affection is a cer- 
tain cordial exhilaration. In poetry, and in common speech, 
the emotions of benevolence and complacency which are felt 
towards others are likened to the material effects of fire; so 
swift, or much more swift, more active, more cheering, are these 
fine inward irradiations. From the highest degree of passionate 
love, to the lowest degree of good- will, thev make the sweetness 
of life. 

Our intellectual and active powers increase with our affection. 
The scholar sits down to write, and all his years of meditation 
do not furnish him with one good thought or happy expression ; 
but it is necessary to write a letter to a friend, — and, forthwith, 
troops of gentle thoughts invest themselves, on every hand, with 
chosen words. See, in any house where virtue and self-respect 
abide, the palpitation which the approach of a stranger causes. 
A commended stranger is expected and announced, and an un- 
easiness betwixt pleasure and pain invades all the hearts of a 
household. His arrival almost brings fear to the good hearts 
that would welcome him. The house is dusted, all things fly 
into their places, the old coat is exchanged for the new, and 

F 



98 ESSAY VI. 

they must get up a dinner if they can. Of a commended 
stranger, only the good report is told by others, only the good 
and new is heard by us. He stands to us for humanity. He 
is what we wish. Having imagined and invested him, we ask 
how we should stand related in conversation and action with 
such a man, and are uneasy with fear. The same idea exalts 
conversation with him. We talk better than we are wont. We 
have the nimblest fancy, a richer memory, and our dumb devil 
has taken leave for the time. For long hours we can continue 
a series of sincere, graceful, rich communications, drawn from 
the oldest, secretest experience, so that they who sit by, of our 
own kinsfolk and acquaintance, shall feel a lively surprise at our 
unusual powers. But as soon as the stranger begins to intrude 
his partialities, his definitions, his defects, into the conversation, 
it is all over. He has heard the first, the last and best he will 
ever hear from us. He is no stranger now. Vulgarity, igno- 
rance, misapprehension, are old acquaintances. Now, when he 
comes, he may get the order, the dress, and the dinner, — but 
the throbbing of the heart, and the communications of the soul, 
no more. 

What is so pleasant as these jets of affection which make a 
young world for me again ? What so delicious as a just and 
firm encounter of two, in a thought, in a feeling ? How beau- 
tiful, on their approach to this beating heart, the steps and 
forms of the gifted and the true ! The moment we indulge our 
affections, the earth is metamorphosed ; there is no winter, and 
no night ; all tragedies, all ennuis, vanish, — all duties, even ; 
nothing fills the proceeding eternity but the forms all radiant 
of beloved persons. Let the soul be assured that somewhere 
in the universe it should rejoin its friend, and it would be con- 
tent and cheerful alone for a thousand years. 

I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, 
the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who 
daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts ? I chide society, I 
embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see 
the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time 
they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, 
becomes mine, — a possession for all time. Nor is Nature so 
poor but she gives me this joy several times, and thus we weave 
social threads of our own, a new web of relations ; and, as many 
thoughts in succession substantiate themselves, we shall, by-and- 
by, stand in a new world of our own creation, and no longer 
strangers and pilgrims in a traditionary globe. My friends have 
come to me unsought. The great God gave them to me. By 



FRIENDSHIP. 9^ 

oldest right, by the divine affinity of virtue with itself, I find 
them, or rather not I, but the Deity in me and in them derides 
and cancels the thick walls of individual character, relation, age, 
sex, circumstance, at which he usually connives, and now makes 
many one. High thanks I owe you, excellent lovers, who cany- 
out the world for me to new and noble depths, and enlarge the 
meaning of all my thoughts. These are new poetry of the first 
bard, — poetry without stop, — hymn, ode, and epic, poetry still 
flowing, Apollo and the Muses chanting still. Will these, too, 
separate themselves from me again, or some of them? I know 
not, but I fear it not ; for my relation to them is so pure, that 
we hold by simple affinity, and the Genius of my life being thus 
social, the same affinity will exert its energy on whomsoever is 
as noble as these men and women, wherever I may be. 

I confess to an extreme tenderness of nature on this point. 
It is almost dangerous to me to " crush the sweet poison of 
misused wine 5 ' of the affections. A new person is to me a great 
event, and hinders me from sleep. I have often had fine fancies 
about persons which have given me delicious hours ; but the joy 
ends in the day ; it yields no fruit. Thought is not born of it ; 
my action is very little modified. I must feel pride in my friend's 
accomplishments as if they were mine, — and a property in his 
virtues. I feel as warmly when he is praised, as the lover when 
he hears applause of his engaged maiden. "We over-estimate 
the conscience of our friend. His goodness seems better than 
our goodness, his nature finer, his temptations less. Every 
thing that is his, — his name, his form, his dress, books, and 
instruments, — fancy enhances. Our own thought sounds new 
and larger from his mouth. 

Yet the systole and diastole of the heart are not without their 
analogy in the ebb and flow of love. Friendship, like the im- 
mortality of the' soul, is too good to be believed. The lover, 
beholding his maiden, half knows that she is not verily that 
which he worships ; and in the golden hour of friendship, we 
are surprised with shades of suspicion and unbelief. We doubt 
that we bestow on our hero the virtues in which he shines, and 
afterwards worship the form to which we have ascribed this 
divine inhabitation. In strictness, the soul does not respect men 
as it respects itself. In strict science all persons underlie the 
same condition of an infinite remoteness. Shall we fear to cool 
our love by mining for the metaphysical foundation of this 
Elysian temple? Shall I not be as real as the things I see? 
If I am, I shall not fear to know them for what they are. Their 
essence is not less beautiful than their appearance, though it 

F 2 



100 ESSAY VI. 

needs finer organs for its apprehension. The root of the plant 
is not unsightly to science, though for chaplets and festoons we 
cut the stem short. And I must hazard the production of the 
bald fact amidst these pleasing reveries, though it should prove 
an Egyptian skull at our banquet. A man who stands united 
with his thought conceives magnificently of himself. He is 
conscious of a universal success, even though bought by uni- 
form particular failures. No advantages, no powers, no gold or 
force, can be any match for him. I cannot choose but rely on 
my own poverty more than on your wealth. I cannot make 
your consciousness tantamount to mine. Only the star dazzles ; 
the planet has a faint, moon-like ray. I hear what you say of 
the admirable parts and tried temper of the party you praise, 
but I see well that for all his purple cloaks I shall not like him, 
unless he is at last a poor Greek like me. I cannot deny it, O 
friend, that the vast shadow of the Phenomenal includes thee 
also in its pied and painted immensity, — thee, also, compared 
with whom all else is shadow. Thou art not Being, as Truth 
is, as Justice is, — thou art not my soul, but a picture and effigy 
of that. Thou hast come to me lately, and already thou art 
seizing thy hat and cloak. Is it not that the soul puts forth 
friends as the tree puts forth leaves, and presently, by the ger- 
mination of new buds, extrudes the old leaf? The law of nature 
is alternation for evermore. Each electrical state superinduces 
the opposite. The soul environs itself with friends, that it may 
enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude ; and it goes 
alone for a season, that it may exalt its conversation or society. 
This method betrays itself along the whole history of our per- 
sonal relations. The instinct of affection revives the hope of 
union with our mates, and the returning sense of insulation 
recalls us from the chase. Thus every man passes his life in 
the search after friendship, and if he should record his true sen- 
timent, he might write a letter like this to each new candidate 
for his love. 

Deab, Friend : — 

If I was sure of thee, sure of thy capacity, sure to match my 
mood with thine, I should never think again of trifles in rela- 
tion to thy comings and goings. I am not very wise ; my moods 
are quite attainable ; and I respect thy genius ; it is to me as 
yet unfathomed ; yet dare I not presume in thee a perfect intel- 
ligence of me, and so thou art to me a delicious torment. Thine 
ever, or never. 

Yet these uneasy pleasures and fine pains are for curiosity, 



FRIENDSHIP. 101 

and not for life. They are not to be indulged. This is to 
weave cobweb, and not cloth. Our friendships hurry to short 
and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of 
wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. 
The laws of friendship are austere and eternal, of one web with 
the laws of nature and of morals. But we have aimed at a 
swift and petty benefit, to suck a sudden sweetness. We snatch 
at the slowest fruit in the whole garden of God, which many 
summers and many winters must ripen. We seek our friend 
not sacredly, but with an adulterate passion which would appro 
priate him to ourselves. In vain. We are armed all over with 
subtle antagonisms, which, as soon as we meet, begin to play, 
and translate all poetry into stale prose. Almost all people de- 
scend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, 
what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each 
of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. 
What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the 
virtuous and gifted ! After interviews have been compassed 
with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled 
blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit 
and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. 
Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved 
by solitude. 

I ought to be equal to every relation. It makes no difference 
how many friends I have, and what content I can find in con- 
versing with each, if there be one to whom I am not equal. If 
I have shrunk unequal from one contest, the joy I find in all 
the rest becomes mean and cowardly. I should hate myself, if 
then I made my other friends my asylum. 

The valiant warrior famoused for fight, 

After a hundred victories, once foiled, 
Is from the "book of honour razed quite, 

And all the rest forgot for which he toiled. 

Our impatience is thus sharply rebuked. Bashfulness and 
apathy are a tough husk, in which a delicate organization is 
protected from premature ripening. It would be lost if it knew 
itself before any of the best souls were yet ripe enough to know 
and own it. Respect the naturlangsamkeit which hardens the 
ruby in a million years, and works in duration, in which Alps 
and Andes come and go as rainbows. The good spirit of our 
life has no heaven which is the price of rashness. Love, which 
is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth 
of man. Let us not have this childish luxury in our regards, 



102 ESSAY VI. 

but the austerest worth ; let us approach our friend with an 
audacious trust in the truth of his heart, in the breadth, impossible 
to be overturned, of his foundations. 

The attractions of this subject are not to be resisted, and I 
leave, for the time, all account of subordinate social benefit, to 
speak of that select and sacred relation which is a kind of ab- 
solute, and which even leaves the language of love suspicious and 
common, so much is this purer, and nothing is so much divine. 

I do not wish to treat friendships daintily, but with roughest 
courage. When they are real, they are not glass threads or 
frostwork, but the solidest thing we know. Por now, after so 
many ages of experience, what do we know of nature, or of our- 
selves ? Not one step has man taken toward the solution of 
the problem of his destiny. In one condemnation of folly stand 
the whole universe of men. But the sweet sincerity of joy and 
peace, which I draw from this alliance with my brother's soul, 
is the nut itself, whereof all nature and all thought is but the 
husk and shell. Happy is the house that shelters a friend ! It 
might well be built, like a festal bower or arch, to entertain him 
a single day. Happier, if he know the solemnity of that rela- 
tion, and honor its law ! He who offers himself a candidate for 
that covenant, comes up, like an Olympian, to the great games, 
where the first-born of the world are the competitors. He pro- 
poses himself for contests where Time, Want, Danger, are in 
the lists, and he alone is victor who has truth enough in his 
constitution to preserve the delicacy of his beauty from the wear 
and tear of all these. The gifts of fortune may be present or 
absent, but all the speed in that contest depends on intrinsic 
nobleness, and the contempt of trifles. There are two elements 
that go to the composition of friendship, each so sovereign that 
I can detect no superiority in either, no reason why either 
should be first named. One is Truth. A friend is a person 
with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. 
I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real and equal, 
that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimula- 
tion, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, 
and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with 
which one chemical atom meets another. Sincerity is the luxury 
allowed, like diadems and authority, only to the highest rank, 
that being permitted to speak truth, as having none above it to 
court or conform unto. Every man alone is sincere. At the 
entrance of a second person, hypocrisy begins. We parry and 
fend the approach of our fellow-man by compliments, by gossip, 
by amusements, by affairs. We cover up our thought from him 



FRIENDSHIP. 103 

under a hundred folds. I knew a man, who, under a certain 
religious frenzy, cast off this drapery, and, omitting all compli- 
ment and commonplace, spoke to the conscience of every person 
he encountered, and that with great insight and beauty. At 
first he was resisted, aud all men agreed he was mad. But per- 
sisting, as indeed he could not help doing, for some time in this 
course, he attained to the advantage of bringing every man of 
his acquaintance into true relations with him. No man would 
think of speaking falsely with him, or of putting him off with 
any chat of markets or reading-rooms. But every man was 
constrained by so much (sincerity to the like plaindealing, and 
what love of nature, what poetry, what symbol of truth he had, 
he did certainly show him. But to most of us society shows 
not its face and eye, but its side and its back. To stand in 
true relations with men in a false age is worth a fit of insanity, 
is it not ? We can seldom go erect. Almost every man we 
meet requires some civility, — requires to be humoured ; he has 
some fame, some talent, some whim of religion or philanthropy 
in his head that is not to be questioned, and which spoils all 
conversation with him. But a friend is a sane man who exer- 
cises not my ingenuity, but me. My friend gives me entertain- 
ment without requiring any stipulation on my part. A friend, 
therefore, is a sort of paradox in nature. I who alone am, I 
who see nothing in nature whose existence I can affirm with 
equal evidence to my own, behold now the semblauce of my 
being, in all its height, variety, and curiosity, reiterated in a 
foreign form ; so that a friend may well be reckoned the master- 
piece of nature. 

The other element of friendship is tenderness. We are hold en 
to men by every sort of tie, by blood, by pride, by fear, by 
hope, by lucre, by lust, by hate, by admiration, by every circum- 
stance, and badge, and trifle, but we can scarce believe that so 
much character can subsist in another as to draw us by love. 
Can another be so blessed, and we so pure, that we can offer him 
tenderness ? When a man becomes dear to me, I have touched 
the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the 
heart of this matter in books. And yet I have one text which I 
cannot choose but remember. My author says, — " I offer my- 
self faintly and bluntly to those whose I effectually am, and 
tender myself least to him to whom I am the most devoted." I 
wish that friendship should have feet, as well as eyes and elo- 
quence. It must plant itself on the ground, before it vaults over 
the moon. I wish it to be a little of a citizen, before it is quite 
a cherub. We chide the citizen because he makes love a com- 



104 ESSAY VI. 

modity. It is an exchange of gifts, of useful loans ; it is good 
neighbourhood ; it watches with the sick ; it holds the pall at 
the funeral ; and quite loses sight of the delicacies and nobility 
of the relation. But though we cannot find the god under 
this disguise of a sutler, yet, on the other hand, we cannot for- 
give the poet if he spins his thread too fine, and does not 
substantiate his romance by the municipal virtues of justice, 
punctuality, fidelity, and pity. I hate the prostitution of the 
name of friendship to signify modish and worldly alliances. I 
much prefer the company of ploughboys and tin- peddlers, to 
the silken and perfumed amity which celebrates its days of 
encounter by a frivolous display, by rides in a curricle, and 
dinners at the best taverns. The end of friendship is a commerce 
the most strict and homely that can be joined ; more strict than 
any of which we have experience. It is for aid and comfort 
through all the relations and passages of life and death. It is 
fit for serene days, and graceful gifts, and country rambles, but 
also for rough roads and hard fare, shipwreck, poverty, and perse- 
cution. It keeps company with the sallies of the wit and the 
trances of religion. We are to dignify to each other the daily 
needs and offices of man's life, and embellish it by courage, 
wisdom, and unity. It should never fall into something usual 
and settled, but should be alert and inventive, and add rhyme 
and reason to what was drudgery. 

Friendship may be said to require natures so rare and costly, 
each so well tempered and so happily adapted, and withal so 
circumstanced (for even in that particular, a poet says, love de- 
mands that the parties be altogether paired), that its satisfaction 
can very seldom be assured. It cannot subsist in its perfection, 
say some of those who are learned in this warm lore of the heart, 
betwixt more than two. I am not quite so strict in my terms, 
perhaps, because I have never known so high a fellowship as 
others. I please my imagination more with a circle of godlike 
men and women variously related to each other, and between 
whom subsists a lofty intelligence. But I find this law of one 
to one peremptory for conversation, which is the practice and 
consummation of friendship. Do not mix waters too much. 
The best mix as ill as good and bad. You shall have very 
useful and cheering discourse at several times with two several 
men, but let all three of you come together, and you shall not 
have one new and hearty word. Two may talk and one may 
hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most 
sincere and searching sort. In good company there is never 
such discourse between two, across the table, as takes place 



FRIENDSHIP. 105 

when you leave them alone. In good company, the individuals 
merge their egotism into a social soul exactly coextensive with 
the several consciousnesses there present. No partialities of 
friend to friend, no fondnesses of brother to sister, of wife to 
husband, are there pertinent, but quite otherwise. Only he 
may then speak who can sail on the common thought of the 
party, and is not poorly limited to his own. Now this conven- 
tion, which good sense demands, destroys the high freedom of 
great conversation, which requires an absolute running of two 
souls into one. 

No two men but, being left alone with each other, enter into 
simpler relations. Yet it is affinity that determines which two 
shall converse. Unrelated men give little joy to each other; 
will never suspect the latent powers of each. We talk some- 
times of a great talent for conversation, as if it were a perma- 
nent property in some individuals. Conversation is an evanes- 
cent relation, — no more. A man is reputed to have thought 
and eloquence ; he cannot, for all that, say a word to his cousin 
or his uncle. They accuse his silence with as much reason as 
they would blame the insignificance of a dial in the shade. In 
the sun it will mark the hour. Among those who enjoy his 
thought, he will regain his tongue. 

Friendship requires that rare mean betwixt likeness and un- 
likeness, that piques each with the presence of power and of 
consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the 
world, rather than that my friend should overstep, by a word or 
a look, his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism 
and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. 
The only joy I have in his being mine, is that the not mine is 
mine. I hate, where I looked for a manly furtherance, or at 
least a manly resistance, to find a mush of concession. Better be 
a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition 
which high friendship demands is ability to do without it. That 
high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be 
very two before there can be very one. Let it be an alliance of 
two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, 
before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath these 
disparities unites them. 

He only is fit for this society who is magnanimous ; who is sure 
that greatness and goodness are always economy; who is not 
swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not intermeddle 
with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect 
to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands 
a religious treatment. We talk of choosing our friends, but 

* 3 



106 ESSAY VI. 

friends are self-elected. Beverence is a great part of it. Treat 
your friend as a spectacle. Of course he has merits that are not 
yours, and that you cannot honour, if you must needs hold him 
close to your person. Stand aside ; give those merits room ; let 
them mount and expand. Are you the friend of your friend's 
buttons, or of his thought ? To a great heart he will still be a 
stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the 
holiest ground. Leave it to girls and boys to regard a friend as 
property, and to suck a short and all- confounding pleasure, in- 
stead of the noblest benefit. 

Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. 
Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding 
on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your 
friend ? Why go to his house, or know his mother and brother 
and sisters ? Why be visited by him at your own ? Are these 
things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and 
clawing. Let him be to me a spirit. A message, a thought, a 
sincerity, a glance from him, I want, but not news, nor pottage. 
I can get politics, and chat, and neighbourly conveniences from 
cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to 
me poetic, pure, universal, and great as nature itself? Ought I 
to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of 
cloud that sleeps on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass 
that divides the brook ? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that 
standard. That great, defying eye, that scornful beauty of his 
mien and action, do not pique yourself on reducing, but rather 
fortify and enhance. Worship his superiorities; wish him not 
less by a thought, but hoard and tell them aD. Guard him as 
thy counterpart. Let him be to thee for ever a sort of beautiful 
enemy, un tameable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveni- 
ency to be soon outgrown and cast aside. The hues of the opal, 
the light of the diamond, are not to be seen, if the eye is too 
near. To my friend I write a letter, and from him I receive 
a letter. That seems to you a little. It suffices me. It is a 
spiritual gift worthy of him to give, and of me to receive. It 
profanes nobody. In these warm lines the heart will trust itself, 
as it will not to the tongue, and pour out the prophecy of a 
godlier existence than all the annals of heroism have yet made 
good. 

Eespect so far the holy laws of this fellowship as not to pre- 
judice its perfect flower by your impatience for its opening. We 
must be our own before we can be another's. There is at least 
this satisfaction in crime, according to the Latin proverb ; — you 
can speak to your accomplice on even terms. Crimen quos inqui- 



FRIENDSHIP. 107 

nat cequat. To those whom we admire and love, at first we 
cannot. Yet the least defect of self-possession vitiates, in my 
judgment, the entire relation. There can never be deep peace 
between two spirits, never mutual respect, until, in their dia- 
logue, each stands for the whole world. 

What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what gran- 
deur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, — so we may hear the 
whisper of the gods. Let us not interfere. Who set you to 
cast about what you should say to the select souls, or how to 
say anything to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter 
how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of 
folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. 
Wait, and thy heart shall speak. Wait until the necessary and 
everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves 
of your lips. The only reward of virtue is virtue ; the only way 
to have a friend is to be one. You shall not come nearer a man 
by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flees the 
faster from you, and you shall never catch a true glance of his 
eye. We see the noble afar off, and they repel us ; why should 
we intrude ? Late, — very late, — we perceive that no arrange- 
ments, no introductions, no consuetudes or habits of society, 
would be of any avail to establish us in such relations with 
them as we desire, — but solely the uprise of nature in us to the 
same degree it is in them ; then shall we meet as water with 
water ; and if we should not meet them then, we shall not want 
them, for we are already they. In the last analysis, love is only 
the reflection of a man's own worthiness from other men. Men 
have sometimes exchanged names with their friends, as if they 
would signify that in their friend each loved his own soul. 

The higher the style we demand of friendship, of course the 
less easy to establish it with flesh and blood. We walk alone in 
the world. Friends, such as we desire, are dreams and fables. 
But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, 
in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, 
enduring, and daring, which can love us, and which we can love. 
We may congratulate ourselves that the period of nonage, of 
follies, of blunders, and of shame, is passed in solitude, and 
when we are finished men, we shall grasp heroic hands in 
heroic hands. Only be admonished by what you already see, 
not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no 
friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and 
foolish alliances w 7 hich no God attends. By persisting in your 
path, though you forfeit the little you gain the great. You 
demonstrate yourself, so as to put yourself out of the reach of 



108 ESSAY VI. 

false relations, and you draw to you the first-born of the world, 
— those rare pilgrims whereof only one or two wander in nature 
at once, and before whom the vulgar great show as spectres and 
shadows merely. 

It is foolish to be afraid of making our ties too spiritual, as if 
so we could lose any genuine love. Whatever correction of our 
popular views we make from insight, nature will be sure to bear 
us out in, and though it seem to rob us of some joy, will repay 
us with a greater. Let us feel, if we will, the absolute insulation 
of man. We are sure that we have all in us. We go to 
Europe, or we pursue persons, or we read books, in the instinc- 
tive faith that these will call it out, and reveal us to ourselves, 
Beggars all. The persons are such as we ; the Europe an old 
faded garment of dead persons ; the books their ghosts. Let us 
drop this idolatry. Let us give over this mendicancy. Let us 
even bid our dearest friends farewell, and defy them, saying, 
' Who are you ? Unhand me : I will be dependent no more.' 
Ah ! seest thou not, brother, that thus we part only to meet 
again on a higher platform, and only be more each other's, be- 
cause we are more our own ? A friend is Janus-faced : he looks 
to the past and the future. He is the child of all my foregoing 
hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a 
greater friend. 

I do then with my friends as I do with my books. I would 
have them where I can find them, but I seldom use them. We 
must have society on our own terms, and admit or exclude it on 
the slightest cause. I cannot afford to speak much with my 
friend. If he is great, he makes me so great that I cannot de- 
scend to converse. In the great days, presentiments hover 
before me in the firmament. I ought then to dedicate myself 
to them. I go in that I may seize them, I go out that I may 
seize them. I fear only that I may lose them receding into the 
sky in which now they are only a patch of brighter light. 
Then, though I prize my friends, I cannot afford to talk with 
them and study their visions, lest I lose my own. It w r ould in- 
deed give me a certain household joy to quit this lofty seeking, 
this spiritual astronomy, or search of stars, and come down to 
warm sympathies with you ; but then I know well I shall mourn 
always the vanishing of my mighty gods. It is true, next week 
I shall have languid moods, when I can well afford to occupy my- 
self with foreign objects ; then I shall regret the lost literature of 
your mind, and wish you were by my side again. But if you 
come, perhaps you will fill my mind only with new visions, not 
with yourself, but with your lustres, and I shall not be able any 



FRIENDSHIP. 109 

more than now to converse with you. So I will owe to my 
friends this evanescent intercourse. I will receive from them, 
not what they have, but what they are. They shall give me 
that which properly they cannot give, but which emanates from 
them. But they shall not hold me by any relations less subtile 
and pure. We will meet as though we met not, and part as 
though we parted not. 

It has seemed to me lately more possible than I knew, to 
carry a friendship greatly, on one side, without due correspon- 
dence on the other. Why should I cumber myself with regrets 
that the receiver is not capacious ? It never troubles the sun 
that some of his rays fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, 
and only a small part on the reflecting planet. Let your great- 
ness educate the crude and cold companion. If he is unequal, 
he will presently pass away ; but thou art enlarged by thy own 
shining, and, no longer a mate for frogs and worms, dost soar 
and burn with the gods of the empyrean. It is thought a dis- 
grace to love unrequited. But the great will see that true love 
cannot be unrequited. True love transcends the unworthy ob- 
ject, and dwells and broods on the eternal, and when the poor 
interposed mask crumbles, it is not sad, but feels rid of so much 
earth, and feels its independency the surer. Yet these things 
may hardly be said without a sort of treachery to the relation. 
The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and 
trust. It must not surmise or provide for infirmity. It treats 
its object as a god, that it may deify both. 



PEUDENCE. 



Theme no poet gladly sung, 
Fair to old and foul to young, 
Scorn not thou the love of parts, 
And the articles of art?. 
Grandeur of the perfect sphere 
Thanks the atoms that cohere. 



ESSAY VII. 

PRUDENCE. 



What right have I to write on Prudence, whereof I have 
little, and that of the negative sort? My prudence consists in 
avoiding and going without, not in the inventing of means and 
methods, not in adroit steering, not in gentle repairing. I have 
no skill to make money spend well, no genius in my economy, 
and whoever sees my garden discovers that I must have some 
other garden. Tet I love facts, and hate lubricity, and people 
without perception. Then I have the same title to write on 
prudence, that I have to write on poetry or holiness. We write 
from aspiration and antagonism, as well as from experience. 
We paint those qualities which we do not posess. The poet 
admires the man of energy and tactics ; the merchant breeds his 
son for the church or the bar : and where a man is not vain and 
egotistic, you shall find what he has not by his praise. More- 
over, it would be hardly honest in me not to balance these fine 
lyric words of Love and Eriendship with words of coarser 
sound, and, whilst my debt to my senses is real and constant, 
not to own it in passing. 

Prudence is the virtue of the senses. It is the science of 
appearances. It is the outmost action of the inward life. It is 
(rod taking thought for oxen. It moves matter after the laws 
of matter. It is content to seek health of body by complying 
with physical conditions, and health of mind by the laws of the 
intellect. 

The world of the senses is a world of shows ; it does not 
exist for itself, but as a symbolic character; and a true prudence 
or law of shows recognizes the co-presence of other laws, and 
knows that its own office is subaltern ; knows that it is surface 
and not centre where it works. Prudence is false when de- 
tached. It is legitimate when it is the Xatural History of the 



114 ESSAY VII. 

soul incarnate ; when it unfolds the beauty of laws within the 
narrow scope of the senses. 

There are all degrees of proficiency in knowledge of the world. 
It is sufficient, to our present purpose, to indicate three. One 
class live to the utility of the symbol ; esteeming health and 
wealth a final good. Another class live above this mark to the 
beauty of the symbol ; as the poet, and artist, and the naturalist, 
and man of science. A third class live above the beauty of the 
symbol to the beauty of the thing signified ; these are wise men. 
The first class have common sense ; the second, taste ; and the 
third, spiritual perception. Once in a long time, a man tra- 
verses the whole scale, and sees and enjoys the symbol solidly ; 
then also has a clear eye for its beauty, and, lastly, whilst he 
pitches his tent on this sacred volcanic isle of nature, does not 
offer to build houses and barns thereon, reverencing the splendor 
of the God which he sees bursting through each chink and 
cranny. 

The world is filled with the proverbs and acts and winkings 
of a base prudence, which is a devotion to matter, as if we pos- 
sessed no other faculties than the palate, the nose, the touch, 
the eye and ear ; a prudence which adores the Eule of Three, 
which never subscribes, which never gives, which seldom lends, 
and asks but one question of any project, — Will it bake bread ? 
This is a disease like a thickening of the skin until the vital 
organs are destroyed. But culture, revealing the high origin of 
the apparent world, and aiming at the perfection of the man as 
the end, degrades everything else, as health and bodily life, into 
means. It sees prudence not to be a several faculty, but a name 
for wisdom and virtue conversing with the body and its wants. 
Cultivated men always feel and speak so, as if a great fortune, 
the achievement of a civil or social measure, great personal 
influence, a graceful and commanding address, had their value 
as proofs of the energy of the spirit. If a man lose his balance, 
and immerse himself in any trades or pleasures for their own 
sake, he may be a good wheel or pin, but he is not a cultivated 
man. 

The spurious prudence, making the senses final, is the god 
of sots and cowards, and is the subject of all comedy. It is 
nature's joke, and therefore literature's. The true prudence 
limits this sensualism by admitting the knowledge of an internal 
and real world. This recognition once made, — the order of the 
world and the distribution of affairs and times being studied 
with the co-perception of their subordinate place, will reward 
any degree of attention. For our existence, thus apparently 



PRUDENCE. 115 

attached in nature to the sun and the returning moon and the 
periods which they mark, — so susceptible to climate and to 
country, so alive to social good and evil, so fond of splendor, 
and so tender to hunger and cold and debt, — reads all its 
primary lessons out of these books. 

Prudence does not go behind nature, and ask whence it is. 
It takes the laws of the world, whereby man's being is con- 
ditioned, as they are, and keeps these laws, that it may enjoy 
their proper good. It respects space and time, climate, want, 
sleep, the law of polarity, growth, and death. There revolve 
to give bound and period to his being, on all sides, the sun and 
moon, the great formalists in the sky : here lies stubborn matter, 
and will not swerve from its chemical routine. Here is a 
planted globe, pierced and belted with natural laws, and fenced 
and distributed externally with civil partitions and properties 
which impose new restraints on the young inhabitant. 

"We eat of the bread which grows in the field. TTe live by 
the air which blows around us, and we are poisoned by the air 
that is too cold or too hot, too dry or too wet. Time, which 
shows so vacant, indivisible, and divine in its coming, is slit and 
peddled into trifles and tatters. A door is to be painted, a lock 
to be repaired. I want wood, or oil, or meal, or salt ; the 
house smokes, or I have a headache; then the tax; and an 
affair to be transacted with a man without heart or brains ; and 
the stinging recollection of an injurious or very awkward word, 
— these eat up the hours. Do what we can, summer will have 
its flies : if we walk in the woods, we must feed mosquitos : if 
we go a-fishing, we must expect a wet coat. Then climate is a 
great impediment to idle persons : we often resolve to give up 
the care of the weather, but still we regard the clouds and the 
rain. 

We are instructed by these petty experiences which usurp the 
hours and years. The hard soil and four months of snow make 
the inhabitant of the northern temperate zone wiser and abler 
than his fellow who enjoys the fixed smile of the tropics. The 
islander may ramble all day at will. At night, he may sleep on 
a mat under the moon, and wherever a wild date-tree grows, 
nature has, without a prayer even, spread a table for his morning 
meal. The northerner is perforce a householder. He must 
brew, bake, salt, and preserve his food, and pile wood and coal. 
But as it happens that not one stroke can labor lay to, without 
some new acquaintance with nature ; and as nature is inex- 
haustibly significant, the inhabitants of these climates have 
always excelled the southerner in force. Such is the value of 



116 ESSAY VII. 

these matters, that a man who knows other things can never 
know too much of these. Let him have accurate perceptions. 
Let him, if he have hands, handle ; if eyes, measure and dis- 
criminate ; let him accept and hive every fact of chemistry, 
natural history, and economics ; the more he has, the less is he 
willing to spare any one. Time is always bringing the occa- 
sions that disclose their value. Some wisdom comes out of 
every natural and innocent action. The domestic man, who 
loves no music so well as his kitchen clock and the airs which 
the logs sing to him as they burn on the hearth, has solaces 
which others never dream of. The application of means to ends 
insures victory and the songs of victory, not less in a farm or a 
shop than in the tactics of party or of war. The good husband 
finds method as efficient in the packing of fire- wood in a shed, 
or in the harvesting of fruits in the cellar, as in Peninsular 
campaigns or the files of the Department of State. In the 
rainy day, he builds a work bench, or gets his tool-box set in 
the corner of the barn-chamber, and stored with nails, gimlet, 
pincers, screwdriver, and chisel. Herein he tastes an old joy of 
youth and childhood, the cat-like love of garrets, presses, and 
corn-chambers, and of the conveniences of long housekeeping. 
His garden or his poultry -yard tells him many pleasant anec- 
dotes. One might find argument for optimism in the abundant 
flow of this saccharine element of pleasure in every suburb and 
extremity of the good world. Let a man keep the law, — any 
law, — and his way will be strown with satisfactions. There is 
more difference in the quality of our pleasures than in the 
amount. 

On the other hand, nature punishes any neglect of prudence. 
If you think the senses final, obey their law. If you believe in 
the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on 
the slow tree of cause and effect. It is vinegar to the eyes, to 
deal with men of loose and imperfect perception. Dr. Johnson 
is reported to have said, — " If the child says he looked out of 
this window, when he looked out of that, — whip him." Our 
American character is marked by a more than average delight 
in accurate perception, which is shown by the currency of the 
byword, " No mistake." But the discomfort of unpunctuality, 
of confusion of thought about facts, of inattention to the wants 
of to-morrow, is of no nation. The beautiful laws of time 
and space, once dislocated by our inaptitude, are holes and 
dens. If the hive be disturbed by rash and stupid hands, 
instead of honey, it will yield us bees. Our words and ac- 
tions to be fair must be timely. A gay and pleasant sound 



PRUDENCE. 117 

is the whetting of the scythe in the mornings of June ; yet 
what is more lonesome and sad than the sound of a whet- 
stone or mower's rifle, when it is too late in the season to make 
hay ? Scatter-brained and " afternoon-men " spoil much more 
than their own affair, in spoiling the temper of those who deal 
with them. I have seen a criticism on some paintings, of which 
I am reminded when I see the shiftless and unhappy men who 
are not true to their senses. The last Grand Duke of TVeirnar, 
a man of superior understanding, said : — iC I have sometimes 
remarked in the presence of great works of art, and just now 
especially, in Dresden, how much a certain property contributes 
to the effect which gives life to the figures, and to the life an 
irresistible truth. This property is the hitting, in all the figures 
we draw, the right centre of gravity. I mean, the placing the 
figures firm upon their feet, making the hands grasp, and fasten- 
ing the eyes on the spot where they should look. Even lifeless 
figures, as vessels and stools, — let them be drawn ever so cor- 
rectly, — lose all effect so soon as they lack the resting upon their 
centre of gravity, and have a certain swimming and oscillating 
appearance. The Eaphael, in the Dresden gallery, (the only 
greatly affecting picture which I have seen.) is the quietest and 
most passionless piece you can imagine ; a couple of saints who 
worship the Virgin and Child. Xevertheless, it awakens a 
deeper impression than the contortions of ten crucified martyrs. 
For, beside all the resistless beauty of form, it possesses in the 
highest degree the property of the perpendicularity of all the 
figures.'* 5 This perpendicularity we demand of all the figures 
in this picture of life. Let them stand on their feet, and not 
float and swing. Let us know where to find them. Let them 
discriminate between what they remember and what they 
dreamed, call a spade a spade, give us facts, and honor their 
own senses with trust. 

But what man shall dare tax another with imprudence ? Who 
is prudent r The men we call greatest are least in this kingdom. 
There is a certain fatal dislocation in our relation to nature, dis- 
torting our modes of living, and making every law our enemy, 
which seems at last to have aroused all the wit and virtue in the 
world to ponder the question of Reform. We must call the 
highest prudence to counsel, and ask why health and beauty and 
genius should now be the exception, rather than the rule, of 
human nature ? TVe do not know the properties of plants and 
animals and the laws of nature through our sympathy with the 
same ; but this remains the dream of poets. Poetry and pru- 
dence should be coincident. Poets should be lawgivers; that 



118 ESSAY VII. 

is, the boldest lyric inspiration should not chide and insult, 
but should announce and lead, the civil code, and the day's 
work. But now the two things seem irreconcilably parted. We 
have violated law upon law, until we stand amidst ruins, and 
when by chance we espy a coincidence between reason and the 
phenomena, we are surprised. Beauty should be the dowry of 
every man and woman, as invariably as sensation; but it is 
rare. Health or sound organization should be universal. Genius 
should be the child of genius, and every child should be in- 
spired; but now it is not to be predicted of any child, and 
nowhere is it pure. We call partial half-lights, by courtesy, 
genius; talent which converts itself to money; talent which 
glitters to-day, that it may dine and sleep well to-morrow ; and 
society is officered by men of parts, as they are properly called, 
and not by divine men. These use their gifts to refine luxury, 
not to abolish it. Genius is always ascetic ; and piety and love. 
Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find 
beauty in rites and bounds that resist it. 

We have found out fine names to cover our sensuality withal, 
but no gifts can raise intemperance. The man of talent affects 
to call his transgressions of the laws of the senses trivial, and 
to count them nothing considered with his devotion to his art. 
His art never taught him lewdness, nor the love of wine, nor 
the wish to reap where he had not sowed. His art is less for 
every deduction from his holiness, and less for every defect of 
common sense. On him who scorned the world, as he said, the 
scorned world wreaks its revenge. He that despiseth small 
things will perish by little and little. Goethe's Tasso is very 
likely to be a pretty fair historical portrait, and that is true 
tragedy. It does not seem to me so genuine grief when some 
tyrannous Richard the Third oppresses and slays a score of in- 
nocent persons, as when Antonio and Tasso, both apparently 
right, wrong each other. One living after the maxims of this 
world, and consistent and true to them, the other fired with all 
divine sentiments, yet grasping also at the pleasures of sense, 
without submitting to their law. That is a grief we all feel, a 
knot we cannot untie. Tasso's is no infrequent case in modern 
biography. A man of genius, of an ardent temperament, reck- 
less of physical laws, self-indulgent becomes presently unfortu- 
nate, querulous, a " discomfortable cousin," a thorn to himself 
and to others. 

The scholar shames us by his bifold life. Whilst something 
higher than prudence is active, he is admirable ; when common 
sense is wanted, he is an encumbrance. Yesterday, Caesar was 



PRUDENCE. 119 

not so great; to-day, the felon at the gallows' foot is not more 
miserable. Yesterday, radiant with the light of an ideal world, 
in which he lives, the first of men ; and now oppressed by wants 
and by sickness, for which he must thank himself. He resembles 
the pitiful drivellers, whom travellers describe as frequenting the 
bazaars of Constantinople, who skulk about all day, yellow, 
emaciated, ragged, sneaking; and at evening, when the bazaars 
are open, slink to the opium-shop, swallow their morsel, and be- 
come tranquil and glorified seers. And who has not seen the 
tragedy of imprudent genius, struggling for years with paltry 
pecuniary difficulties, at last sinking, chilled, exhausted, and 
fruitless, like a giant slaughtered by pins ? 

Is it not better that a man should accept the first pains and 
mortifications of this sort, which nature is not slack in sending 
him, as hints that he must expect no other good than the just 
fruit of his own labour and self-denial ? Health, bread, cli- 
mate, social position, have their importance, and he will give 
them their due. Let him esteem Nature a perpetual counsellor, 
and her perfections the exact measure of our deviations. Let 
him make the night night, and the day day. Let him control 
the habit of expense. Let him see that as much wisdom may 
be expended on a private economy as on an empire, and as 
much wisdom may be drawn from it. The laws of the world 
are written out for him on every piece of money in his hand. 
There is nothing he will not be the better for knowing, were it 
only the wisdom of Poor Richard ; or the State-Street prudence 
of buying by the acre to sell by the foot ; or the thrift of the 
agriculturist, to stick a tree between whiles, because it will grow 
whilst he sleeps ; or the prudence which consists in husbanding 
little strokes of the tool, little portions of time, particles of 
stock, and small gains. The eye of prudence may never shut. 
Iron, if kept at the ironmonger's, will rust ; beer, if not brewed 
in the right state of the atmosphere, will sour ; timber of ships 
will rot at sea, or, if laid up high and dry, will strain, warp, and 
dry-rot ; money, if kept by us, yields no rent, and is liable to 
loss ; if invested, is liable to depreciation of the particular 
kind of stock. Strike, says the smith, the iron is white ; keep 
the rake, says the haymaker, as nigh the scythe as you can, and 
the cart as nigh the rake. Our Yankee trade is reputed to be 
very much on the extreme of this prudence. It takes bank- 
notes,- — good, bad, clean, ragged, — and saves itself by the speed 
with which it passes them off. Iron cannot rust, nor beer sour, 
nor timber rot, nor calicoes go out of fashion, nor money stocks 



120 ESSAY VII. 

depreciate, in the few swift moments in which the Yankee suffers 
any one of them to remain in his possession. In skating over 
thin ice, our safety is in our speed. 

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn 
that everything in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law, 
and not by luck, and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence 
and self-command, let him put the bread he eats at his own dis- 
posal, that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to other 
men ; for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise 
the minor virtues. How much of human life is lost in waiting ! 
let him not make his fellow -creatures wait. How many words 
and promises are promises of conversation ! let his be words of 
fate. When he sees a folded and sealed scrap of paper float 
round the globe in a pine ship, and come safe to the eye for 
which it was written, amidst a swarming population, let him 
likewise feel the admonition to integrate his being across all 
these distracting forces, and keep a slender human word among 
the storms, distances, and accidents that drive us hither and 
thither, and, by persistency, make the paltry force of one man 
reappear to redeem its pledge, after months and years, in the 
most distant climates. 

We must not try to write the laws of any one virtue, looking 
at that only. Human nature loves no contradictions, but is 
symmetrical. The prudence which secures an outward well- 
being is not to be studied by one set of men, whilst heroism 
and holiness are studied by another, but they are reconcilable. 
Prudence concerns the present time, persons, property, and 
existing forms. But as every fact hath its roots in the soul, and, 
if the soul were changed, would cease to be, or would become 
some other thing, the proper administration of outward things 
will always rest on a just apprehension of their cause and origin, 
that is, the good man will be the wise man, and the single- 
hearted, the politic man. Every violation of truth is not only 
a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human 
society. On the most profitable lie, the course of events pre- 
sently lays a destructive tax ; whilst frankness invites frankness, 
puts the parties on a convenient footing, and makes their busi- 
ness a friendship. Trust men, and they will be true to you ; 
treat them greatly, and they will show themselves great, though 
they make an exception in your favour to all their rules of trade. 

So, in regard to disagreeable and formidable things, prudence 
does not consist in evasion, or in flight, but in courage. He 
who wishes to walk in the most peaceful parts of life with any 



PRUDENCE. 121 

serenity, must screw himself up to resolution. Let him front the 
object of his worst apprehension, and his stoutness will com- 
monly make his fear groundless. The Latin proverb says, that 
"in battles the eye is first overcome." Entire self-possession 
may make a battle very little more dangerous to life than a 
match at foils or at football. Examples are cited by soldiers, of 
men who have seen the cannon pointed, and the fire given to it, 
and who have stepped aside from the path of the ball. The 
terrors of the storm are chiefly confined to the parlour and the 
cabin. The drover, the sailor, buffets it all day, and his health 
renews itself at as vigorous a pulse under the sleet, as under 
the sun of June. 

In the occurrence of unpleasant things among neighbours, 
fear comes readily to heart, and magnifies the consequence of 
the other party; but it is a bad counsellor. Every man is 
actually weak, and apparently strong. To himself, he seems 
weak; to others, formidable. You are afraid of Grim; but 
Grim also is afraid of you. You are solicitous of the good-will 
of the meanest person, uneasy at his ill-will. But the sturdiest 
offender of your peace and of the neighbourhood, if you rip up 
his claims, is as thin and timid as any ; and the peace of society 
is often kept, because, as children say, one is afraid, and the 
other dares not. Ear off, men swell, bully, and threaten; bring 
them hand to hand, and they are a feeble folk. 

It is a proverb, that " courtesy costs nothing ; " but calcu- 
lation might come to value love for its profit. Love is fabled 
to be blind ; but kindness is necessary to perception ; love is 
not a hood, but an eye-water. If you meet a sectary, or a 
hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines ; but meet on 
what common ground remains, — if only that the sun shines, and 
the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and, ere 
you know it, the boundary mountains, on which the eye had 
fastened, have melted into air. If they set out to contend, 
Saint Paul will lie, and Saint John will hate. TVhat low, poor, 
paltry, hypocritical people an argument on religion will make 
of the pure and chosen souls ! They will shuffle and crow, 
crook and hide, feign to confess here, only that they may brag 
and conquer there, and not a thought has enriched either party, 
and not an emotion of bravery, modesty, or hope. So neither 
should you put yourself in a false position with your contem- 
poraries, by indulging a vein of hostility and bitterness. Though 
your views are in straight antagonism to theirs, assume an 
identity of sentiment, assume that you are saying precisely that 
which all think, and in the flow of wit and love roll out 

G 



122 ESSAY VII. 

your paradoxes in solid column, with not the infirmity of a 
doubt. So at least shall you get an adequate deliverance. The 
natural motions of the soul are so much better than the volun- 
tary ones, that you will never do yourself justice in dispute. 
The thought is not then taken hold of by the right handle, does 
not show itself proportioned, and, in its true bearings, but bears 
extorted, hoarse, and half witness. But assume a consent, and 
it shall presently be granted, since, really, and underneath their 
external diversities, all men are of one heart and mind. 

Wisdom will never let us stand with any man or men on an 
unfriendly footing. We refuse sympathy and intimacy with 
people, as if we waited for some better sympathy and intimacy 
to come. But whence and when ? To-morrow will be like to- 
day. Life wastes itself whilst we are preparing to live. Our 
friends and fellow-workers die off from us. Scarcely can we 
say, we see new men, new women, approaching us. We are too 
old to regard fashion, too old to expect patronage of any greater 
or more powerful. Let us suck the sweetness of those affec- 
tions and consuetudes that grow near us. These old shoes are 
easy to the feet. Undoubtedly, we can easily pick faults in our 
company, can easily whisper names prouder, and that tickle the 
fancy more. Every man's imagination hath its friends ; and 
life would be dearer with such companions. But, if you cannot 
have them on good mutual terms, you cannot have them. If 
not the Deity, but our ambition, hews and shapes the new re- 
lations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor in 
garden-beds. 

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility, and all the 
virtues, range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of 
securing a present well-being. I do not know if all matter will 
be found to be made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at 
last, but the world of manners and actions is wrought of one 
stuff, and, begin where we will, we are pretty sure in a short 
space to be mumbling our ten commandments. 



HEROISM. 



Paradise is under the shadow of swords. 

Mahomet. 

Ruby wine is drunk by knaves, 
Sugar spends to fatten slaves, 
Rose and vine-leaf deck buffoons ; 
Thunderclouds are Jove's festoons ; 
Drooping oft in wreaths of dread, 
Lightning-knotted round his head. 
The hero is not fed on sweets, 
Daily his own heart he eats ; 
Chambers of the great are jails, 
And head- winds right for royal sails. 



ESSAY VIII. 

HEKOISM. 



In the elder English, dramatists, and mainly in the plays of 
Beaumont and Fletcher, there is a constant recognition of gen- 
tility, as if a noble behaviour were as easily marked, in the 
society of their age, as color is in our American population. 
TVhen any Eodrigo, Pedro, or Talerio enters, though he be a 
stranger, the duke or governor exclaims, This is a gentleman, 
— and proffers civilities without end ; but all the rest are slag 
and refuse. In harmony with this delight in personal advan- 
tages, there is in their plays a certain heroic cast of character 
and dialogue, — as in Bonduca, Sophocles, the Mad Lover, the 
Double Marriage, — wherein the speaker is so earnest and cordial, 
and on such deep grounds of character, that the dialogue, on the 
slightest additional incident in the plot, rises naturally into 
poetry. Among many texts, take the following. The Eoman 
Martins has conquered Athens, — all but the invincible spirits of 
Sophocles the duke of Athens, and Dorigen, his wife. The 
beauty of the latter inflames Martius, and he seeks to save her 
husband ; but Sophocles will not ask his life, although assured 
that a word will save him, and the execution of both proceeds. 

Valerius. Bid thy wife farewell. 

Soph. No, I will take no leave. My Dorigen, 
Yonder, above, 'bout Ariadne's crown, 
My spirit shall hover for thee. Prithee, haste. 

Dor. Stay, Sophocles, — with this tie up my sight; 
Let not soft nature so transformed be, 
And lose her gentler sexed humanity, 
To make me see my lord bleed. So, 't is well ; 
Never one object underneath the sun 
"Will I behold before my Sophocles : 
Farewell ; now teach the Romans how to die. 



126 ESSAY VIII. 

Mar. Dost know what 't is to die ] 

Soph. Thou dost not, Martius, 
And, therefore, not what 't is to live ; to die 
Is to begin to live. It is to end 
An old, stale, weary work, and to commence 
A newer and a better. 'T is to leave 
Deceitful knaves for the society 
Of gods and goodness. Thou thyself must part 
At last from all thy garlands, pleasures, triumphs, 
And prove thy fortitude what then 't will do. 

Val. But art not grieved nor vexed to leave thy life thus % 

Soph. Why should I grieve or vex for being sent 
To them I ever loved best 1 Now I '11 kneel, 
But with my back toward thee ; 't is the last duty 
This trunk can do the gods. 

Mar. Strike, strike, Valerius, 
Or Martius' heart will leap out at his mouth : 
This is a man, a woman ! Kiss thy lord, 
And live with all the freedom you were wont. 

love ! thou doubly hast afflicted me 

With virtue and with beauty. Treacherous heart. 
My hand shall cast thee quick into my urn, 
Ere thou transgress this knot of piety. 

Val. What ails my brother ? 

Soph. Martius, Martius, 
Thou now hast found a way to conquer me. 

Dor. star of Rome ! what gratitude can speak 
Fit words to follow such a deed as this] 

Mar. This admirable duke, Valerius, 
With his disdain of fortune and of death, 
Captived himself, has captivated me, 
And though my arm hath ta ? en his body here, 
His soul hath subjugated Martius' soul. 
By Romulus, he is all soul, I think ; 
He hath no flesh, and spirit cannot be gyved ; 
Then we have vanquished nothing ; he is free , 
And Martius walks now in captivity. 

1 do not readily remember any poem, play, sermon, novel, 
or oration, that our press vents in the last few years, which goes 
to the same tune. We have a great many flutes and flageolets, 
but not often the sound of any fife. Yet, Wordsworth's Laoda- 
mia, and the ode of " Dion/' and some sonnets, have a certain 
noble music ; and Scott will sometimes draw a stroke like the 
portrait of Lord Evandale, given by Balfour of Burley. Thomas 
Carlyle, with his natural taste for what is manly and daring in 
character, has suffered no heroic trait in his favorites to drop 
from his biographical and historical pictures. Earlier, Eobert 
Burns has given us a song or two. In the Harleian Miscella- 
nies, there is an account of the battle of Lutzen, which deserves 
to be read. And Simon Ockley's History of the Saracens re- 



HEROISM. 127 

counts the prodigies of individual valor with admiration, all the 
more evident on the part of the narrator, that he seems to think 
that his place in Christian Oxford requires of him some proper 
protestations of abhorrence. But, if we explore the literature of 
Heroism, we shall quickly come to Plutarch, who is its Doctor 
and Historian. To him we owe the Brasidas, the Dion, the 
Epaminondas, the Scipio of old, and I must think we are more 
deeply indebted to him than to all the ancient writers. Each 
of his " Lives " is a refutation to the despondency and cow- 
ardice of our religious and political theorists. A wild courage, 
a Stoicism, not of the schools, but of the blood, shines in every 
anecdote, and has given that book its immense fame. 

We need books of this tart cathartic virtue, more than books 
of political science, or of private economy. Life is a festival 
only to the wise. Seen from the nook and chimney-side of 
prudence, it wears a ragged and dangerous front. The viola- 
tions of the laws of nature by our predecessors and our contem- 
poraries are punished in us also. The disease and deformity 
around us certify the infraction of natural, intellectual, and 
moral laws, and often violation on violation to breed such com- 
pound misery. A lockjaw, that bends a man's head back to his 
heels; hydrophobia, that makes him bark at his wife and babes; 
insanity, that makes him eat grass ; war, plague, cholera, famine, 
indicate a certain ferocity in nature, which, as it had its inlet by 
human crime, must have its outlet by human suffering. Unhap- 
pily, no man exists who has not in his own person become, to 
some amount, a stockholder in the sin, and so made himself 
liable to a share in the expiation. 

Our culture, therefore, must not omit the arming of the man. 
Let him hear in season, that he is born into the state of war, 
and that the commonwealth and his own well-being require that 
he should not go dancing in the weeds of peace, but warned, 
self-collected, and neither defying nor dreading the thunder, let 
him take both reputation and life in his hand, and, with perfect 
urbanity, dare the gibbet and the mob by the absolute truth of 
his speech, and the rectitude of his behaviour. 

Towards all this external evil, the man within the breast 
assumes a warlike attitude, and affirms his ability to cope single- 
handed with the infinite army of enemies. To this military 
attitude of the soul we give the name of Heroism. Its rudest 
form is the contempt for safety and ease, which makes the 
attractiveness of war. It is a self-trust which slights the re- 
straints of prudence, in the plenitude of its energy and power 
to repair the harms it may suffer. The hero is a mind of such 



128 ESSAY VIII. 

balance that no disturbances can shake his will, but pleasantly, 
and, as it were, merrily, he advances to his own music, alike in 
frightful alarms and in the tipsy mirth of universal dissoluteness. 
There is somewhat not philosophical in heroism ; there is some- 
what not holy in it ; it seems not to know that other souls are 
of one texture with it ; it has pride ; it is the extreme of indi- 
vidual nature. Nevertheless, we must profoundly revere it. 
There is somewhat in great actions, which does not allow us to 
go behind them. Heroism feels and never reasons, and there- 
fore is always right; and although a different breeding, dif- 
ferent religion, and greater intellectual activity would have 
modified or even reversed the particular action, yet for the hero 
that thing he does is the highest deed, and is not open to the 
censure of philosophers or divines. It is the avowal of the un- 
schooled man, that he finds a quality in him that is negligent 
of expense, of health, of life, of danger, of hatred, of reproach, 
and knows that his will is higher and more excellent than all 
actual and all possible antagonists. 

Heroism works in contradiction to the voice of mankind, and 
in contradiction, for a time, to the voice of the great and good. 
Heroism is an obedience to a secret impulse of an individual's 
character. Now to no other man can its wisdom appear as it 
does to him, for every man must be supposed to see a little 
farther on his own proper path than any one else. Therefore, 
just and wise men take umbrage at his act, until after some little 
time be past : then they see it to be in unison with their acts. 
All prudent men see that the action is clean contrary to a sen- 
sual prosperity ; for every heroic act measures itself by its 
contempt of some external good. But it finds its own success 
at last, and then the prudent also extol. 

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the 
soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of 
falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be in- 
flicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, gene- 
rous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and 
scornful of being scorned. It persists ; it is of an undaunted 
boldness, and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest 
is the littleness of common life. That false prudence which 
dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment of heroism. 
Heroism, like Plotinus, is almost ashamed of its body. What 
shall it say, then, to the sugar-plums and cat's-cradles, to the 
toilet, compliments, quarrels, cards, and custard, which rack the 
wit of all society ? What joys has kind nature provided for us 
dear creatures ! There seems to be no interval between great- 



HEROISM. 129 

ness and meanness. When the spirit is not master of the world, 
then it is its dupe. Yet the little man takes the great hoax so 
innocently, works in it so headlong and believing, is born red, 
and dies gray, arranging his toilet, attending on his own health, 
laying traps for sweet food and strong wine, setting his heart on 
a horse or a rifle, made happy with a little gossip or a little 
praise, that the great soul cannot choose but laugh at such 
earnest nonsense. " Indeed, these humble considerations make 
me out of love with greatness. What a disgrace is it to me to 
take note how many pairs of silk stockings thou hast, namely, 
these and those that were the peach-colored ones ; or to bear 
the inventory of thy shirts, as one for superfluity, and one other 
for use ! " 

Citizens, thinking after the laws of arithmetic, consider the 
inconvenience of receiving strangers at their fireside, reckon 
narrowly the loss of time and the unusual display : the soul of 
a better quality thrusts back the unseasonable economy into the 
vaults of life, and says, I will obey the God, and the sacrifice 
and the fire he will provide. Ibu Hankal, the Arabian geo- 
grapher, describes a heroic extreme in the hospitality of Sogd, 
in Bukharia. " When I was in Sogd, I saw a great building, 
like a palace, the gates of which were open and fixed back to the 
wall with large nails. I asked the reason, and was told that 
the house had not been shut, night or day, for a hundred years. 
Strangers may present themselves at any hour, and in whatever 
number; the master has amply provided for the reception of 
the men and their animals, and is never happier than when they 
tarry for some time. Nothing of the kind have I seen in any 
other country." The magnanimous know very well that they 
who give time, or money, or shelter, to the stranger — so it be 
done for love, and not for ostentation — do, as it were, put God 
under obligation to them, so perfect are the compensations of 
the universe. In some way the time they seem to lose is re- 
deemed, and the pains they seem to take remunerate themselves. 
These men fan the flame of human love, and raise the standard 
of civil virtue among mankind. But hospitality must be for 
service, and not for show, or it pulls down the host. The brave 
soul rates itself too high to value itself by the splendor of its 
table and draperies. It gives what it hath, and all it hath, but 
its own majesty can lend a better grace to bannocks and fair 
water than belong to city feasts. 

The temperance of the hero proceeds from the same wish to 
do no dishonor to the worthiness he has. But he loves it for its 
elegancy, not for its austerity. It seems not worth his while to 

& 3 



130 ESSAY VIII. 

be solemn, and denounce with bitterness flesh-eating or wine- 
drinking, the use of tobacco, or opium, or tea, or silk,, or gold. 
A great man scarcely knows how he dines, how he dresses ; but 
without railing or precision, his living is natural and poetic. 
John Eliot, the Indian Apostle, drank water, and said of wine, 
— " It is a noble, generous liquor, and we should be humbly 
thankful for it, but, as I remember, water was made before it." 
Better still is the temperance of King David, who poured out 
on the ground unto the Lord the water which three of his 
warriors had brought him to drink, at the peril of their lives. 

It is told of Brutus, that when he fell on his sword, after the 
battle of Philippi, he quoted a line of Euripides, — " virtue ! 
I have followed thee through life, and I find thee at last but a 
shade." I doubt not the hero is slandered by this report. The 
heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not 
ask to dine nicely, and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness 
is the perfection that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. 
It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss. 

But that which takes ray fancy most, in the heroic class, is 
the good-humor and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to 
which common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare 
with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion, success, and 
life, at so cheap a rate, that they will not soothe their enemies 
by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual 
greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation, refuses to do him- 
self so great a disgrace as to wait for justification, though he 
had the scroll of his accouuts in his hands, but tears it to pieces 
before the tribunes. Socrates' condemnation of himself to be 
maintained in all honor in the Prytaneum, during his life, and 
Sir Thomas More's playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same 
strain. In Beaumont and Fletcher's " Sea Voyage," Juletta 
tells the stout captain and his company, — 

Jul. Why, slaves, 't is in our power to hang ye. 
Master. Very likely, 

'T is in our powers, then, to be hanged, and scorn ye. 

These replies are sound and whole. Sport is the bloom and 
glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take 
anything seriously ; all must be as gay as the song of a canary, 
though it were the building of cities, or the eradication of old 
and foolish churches and nations, which have cumbered the earth 
long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the history and 
customs of this world behind them, and play their own game in 
innocent defiance of the Blue-Laws of the world; and such 






HEROISM. 131 

would appear, could we see the human race assembled in vision, 
like little children frolicking together: though, to the eyes of 
mankind at large, they wear a stately and solemn garb of works 
and influences. 

The interest these fine stories have for us, the power of a 
romance over the boy who grasps the forbidden book under his 
bench at school, our delight in the hero, is the main fact to our 
purpose. Ail these great and transcendent properties are ours. 
If we dilate in beholding the Greek energy, the Roman pride, it 
is that we are already domesticating the same sentiment. Let 
us find room for this great guest in our small houses. The first 
step of worthiness will be to disabuse us of our superstitious 
associations with places and times, with number and size. Why 
should these words, Athenian. Roman, Asia, and England, so 
tingle in the ear *? Where the heart is a there the muses, there 
the gods sojourn, and not in any geography of fame. Massa- 
chusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston Bay, you think paltry 
places, and the ear loves names of foreign and classic topography. 
But here we are ; and, if we will tarry a little, we may come to 
learn that here is best. See to it, only, that thyself is here; — 
and art and nature, hope and fate, friends, angels, and the Su- 
preme Being, shall not be absent from the chamber where thou 
sittest. Epaniinondas, brave and affectionate, does not seem to 
us to need Olympus to die upon, nor the Syrian sunshine. He 
lies very well where he is. The Jerseys were handsome ground 
enough for Washington to tread, and London streets for the feet 
of Milton. A great man makes his climate genial in the ima- 
gination of men, and its air the beloved element of all delicate 
spirits. That country is the fairest, which is inhabited by the 
noblest minds. The pictures which fill the imagination in 
reading the actions of Pericles, Xenophon, Columbus, Bayard, 
Sidney, Hampden, teach us how needlessly mean our life is, that 
we, by the depth of our living, should deck it with more than 
regal or national splendor, and act on principles that should 
interest man and nature in the length of our days, 

T\ e have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men, 
who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not 
extraordinary. When we see their air and mien, when we hear 
them speak of society, of books, of religion, we admire their 
superiority, they seem to throw contempt on our entire polity 
and social state : theirs is the tone of a youthful giant, who is 
sent to work revolutions. But they enter an active profession, 
and the forming Colossus shrinks to the common size of man. 
The rnasic they used was the ideal tendencies, which always 



132 ESSAY VIII. 

make the Actual ridiculous ; but the tough world had its re- 
venge the moment they put their horses of the sun to plough in 
its furrow. They found no example and no companion, and 
their heart fainted. What then ? The lesson they gave in their 
first aspirations is yet true ; and a better valor and a purer truth 
shall one day organize their belief. Or why should a woman 
liken herself to any historical woman, and think, because Sappho, 
or Sevigne, or De Stael, or the cloistered souls who have had 
genius and cultivation, do not satisfy the imagination and the 
serene Themis, none can, — certainly not she. Why not? She 
has a new and unattempted problem to solve, perchance that of 
the happiest nature that ever bloomed. Let the maiden, with 
erect soul, walk serenely on her way, accept the hint of each new 
experience, search in turn all the objects that solicit her eye, 
that she may learn the power and the charm of her new-born 
being, which is the kindling of a new dawn in the recesses of 
space. The fair girl, who repels interference by a decided and 
proud choice of influences, so careless of pleasing, so wilful and 
lofty, inspires every beholder with somewhat of her own noble- 
ness. The silent heart encourages her ; O friend, never strike 
sail to a fear ! Come into port greatly, or sail with God the seas. 
Not in vain you live, for every passing eye is cheered and refined 
by the vision. 

The characteristic of heroism is its persistency. All men 
have wandering impulses, fits, and starts of generosity. But 
when you have chosen your part, abide by it, and do not weakly 
try to reconcile yourself with the world. The heroic cannot be 
the common, nor the common the heroic. Yet we have the 
weakness to expect the sympathy of people in those actions whose 
excellence is that they outrun sympathy, a*id appeal to a tardy 
justice. If you would serve your brother, because it is fit for 
you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find 
that prudent people do not commend you. Adhere to your own 
act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange 
and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age. 
It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, 
— " Always do what you are afraid to do." A simple, manly 
character need never make an apology, but should regard its 
past action with the calmness of Phocion, when he admitted 
that the event of the battle was happy, yet did not regret his 
dissuasion from the battle. 

There is no weakness or exposure for which we cannot find 
consolation in the thought, — this is a part of my constitution, 
part of my relation and office to my fellow-creature. Has na- 






HEROISM. 133 

ture covenanted with me that I should never appear to dis- 
advantage, never make a ridiculous figure ? Let us be generous 
of our dignity, as well as of our money. Greatness once and 
for ever has done with opinion. We tell our charities, not 
because we wish to be praised for them, not because we think 
they have great merit, but for our justification. It is a capital 
blunder; as you discover, when another man recites his chari- 
ties. 

To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with 
some rigor of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems 
to be an asceticism which common good-nature would appoint 
to those who are at ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a 
brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering men. And 
not only need we breathe and exercise the soul by assuming the 
penalties of abstinence, of debt, of solitude, of unpopularity, 
but it behoves the wise man to look with a bold eye into those 
rarer dangers which sometimes invade men, and to familiarize 
himself with disgusting forms of disease, with sounds of execra- 
tion, and the vision of violent death. 

Times of heroism are generally times of terror, but the day 
never shines in which this element may not work, The cir- 
cumstances of man, we say, are historically somewhat better in 
this country, and at this hour, than perhaps ever before. More 
freedom exists for culture. It will not now run against an axe 
at the first step out of the beaten track of opinion. But whoso 
is heroic will always find crises to try his edge. Human virtue 
demands her champions and martyrs, and the trial of persecu- 
tion always proceeds. It is but the other day that the brave 
Lovejoy gave his breast to the bullets of a mob, for the rights 
of free speech and opinion, and died when it was better not to 
live. 

I see not any road of perfect peace which a man can walk, 
but after the counsel of his own bosom. Let him quit too much 
association, let him go home much, and stablish himself in those 
courses he approves. The unremitting retention of simple and 
high sentiments in obscure duties is hardening the character to 
that temper which will work with honor, if need be, in the 
tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever outrages have happened 
to men may befall a man again ; and very easily in a republic, 
if there appear any signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slander, 
fire, tar and feathers, and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring 
home to his mind, and with what sweetness of temper he can, 
and inquire how fast he can fix his sense of duty, braving such 
penalties, whenever it may please the next newspaper and a 



134 ESSAY VIII. 

sufficient number of his neighbours to pronounce his opinions 
incendiary. 

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most sus- 
ceptible heart, to see how quick a bound nature has set to the 
utmost infliction of malice. We rapidly approach a brink over 
which no enemy can follow us. 

Let them rave : 
Thou art quiet in thy grave. 

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour 
when we are deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those 
who have seen safely to an end their manful endeavour ? Who 
that sees the meanness of our politics, but inly congratulates 
Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud, and 
for ever safe ; that he was laid sweet in his grave, the hope of 
humanity not yet subjugated in him? Who does not some- 
times envy the good and brave, who are no more to suffer from 
the tumults of the natural world, and await with curious com- 
placency the speedy term of his own conversation with finite 
nature ? And yet the love that will be annihilated sooner than 
treacherous has already made death impossible, and affirms itself 
no mortal, but a native of the deeps of absolute and inextinguish- 
able being. 



THE OVER-SOUL. 



But souls that of his own good life partake, 
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye 
They are to Him : He '11 never them forsake : 
When they shall die, then God himself shall die : 
They live, they live in blest eternity. 

Henry More. 

Space is ample, east and west, 

But two cannot go abreast, 

Cannot travel in it two : 

Yonder masterful cuckoo 

Crowds every egg out of the nest, 

Quick or dead, except its own ; 

A spell is laid on sod and stone, 

Night and day 've been tampered with, 

Every quality and pith 

Surcharged and sultry with a power 

That works its will on age and hour. 



ESSAY IX. 

THE OYEE-SOUL. 



There is a difference between one and another hour of life, 
in their authority and subsequent effect. Our faith comes in 
moments ; our vice is habitual. Yet there is a depth in those 
brief moments which constrains us to ascribe more reality to 
them than to all other experiences. For this reason, the argu- 
ment which is always forthcoming to silence those who conceive 
extraordinary hopes of man. namely, the appeal to experience, is 
for ever invalid and vain. We give up the past to the objector, 
and yet we hope. He must explain tins hope. We grant that 
human life is mean ; but how did we find out that it was mean? 
What is the ground of this uneasiness of ours; of this old dis- 
content ? What is the universal sense of want and ignorance, 
but the fine inuendo by which the soul makes its enormous 
claim ? Why do men feel that the natural history of man has 
never been written, but he is always leaving behind what you 
have said of him, and it becomes old, and books of metaphysics 
worthless ? The philosophy of six thousand years has not 
searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. In its ex- 
periments there has always remained, in the last analysis, a 
residuum it could not resolve. Man is a stream whose source is 
hidden. Our being is descending into us from we know not 
whence. The most exact calculator has no prescience that some- 
what incalculable may not balk the very next moment. I am 
constrained every moment to acknowledge a higher origin for 
events than the will I call mine. 

As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that 
flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season 
its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner ; not a cause, 
but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water ; that I desire 



138 ESSAY IX. 

and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but 
from some alien energy the visions come. 

The Supreme Critic on the errors of the past and the present, 
and the only prophet of that which must be, is that great nature 
in which we rest, as the earth lies in the soft arms of the atmo- 
sphere; that Unity, that Over-soul, within which every man's 
particular being is contained and made one with all other ; that 
common heart, of which all sincere conversation is the worship, 
to which all right action is submission; that overpowering 
reality which confutes our tricks and talents, and constrains 
every one to pass for what he is, and to speak from his character, 
and not from his tongue, and which evermore tends to pass into 
our thought and hand, and become wisdom, and virtue, and 
power, and beauty. We live in succession, in division, in parts, 
in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole ; 
the wise silence ; the universal beauty, to which every part and 
particle is equally related ; the eternal One. And this deep 
power in which we exist, and whose beatitude is all accessible 
to us, is not only self-sufficing and perfect in every hour, but the 
act of seeing and the thing seen, the seer and the spectacle, the 
subject and the object, are one. We see the world piece by piece, 
as the sun, the moon, the animal, the tree ; but the whole, of 
which these are the shining parts, is the soul. Only by the 
vision of that Wisdom can the horoscope of the ages be read, 
and by falling back on our better thoughts, by yielding to the 
spirit of prophecy which is innate in every man, we can know 
what it saith. Every man's words, who speaks from that life, 
must sound vain to those who do not dwell in the same thought 
on their own part. I dare not speak for it. My words do not 
carry its august sense ; they fall short and cold. Only itself can 
inspire whom it will, and behold ! their speech shall be lyrical, 
and sweet, and universal as the rising of the wind. Yet I 
desire, even by profane words, if I may not use sacred, to indi- 
cate the heaven of this deity, and to report what hints I have 
collected of the transcendent simplicity and energy of the 
Highest Law. 

If we consider what happens in conversation, in reveries, in 
remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in the instructions 
of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade, — the 
droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element, 
and forcing it on our distinct notice, — we shall catch many hints 
that will broaden and lighten into knowledge of the secret of 
nature. All goes to show that the soul in man is not an organ, 
but animates and exercises all the organs ; is not a function, 






THE OVEU-SOUL. 139 

like the powers of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but 
uses these as hands and feet ; is not a faculty, but a light ; is 
not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect and 
the will ; is the background of our being, in which, they lie, — 
an immensity not possessed and that cannot be possessed. 
[From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon 
things, and makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light 
is all. A man is the facade of a temple wherein all wisdom 
and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating, 
drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, 
represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not 
respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear 
through his action, would make our knees bend. When it 
breathes through his intellect, it is genius ; when it breathes 
through his will, it is virtue ; when it flows through his affection, 
it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins, when it 
would be something of itself. The weakness of the will begins, 
when the individual would be something of himself. All reform 
aims, in some one particular, to let the soul have its way through 
us ; in other words, to engage us to obey. 

Of this pure nature every man is at some time sensible. 
Language cannot paint it with his colors. It is too subtile. 
It is undefinable, unmeasurable, but we know that it pervades 
and contains us. We know that all spiritual being is in man. 
A wise old proverb says, " God comes to see us without bell;" 
that is, as there is no screen or ceiling between our heads and 
the infinite heavens, so is there no bar or wall in the soul where 
man, the effect, ceases, and God, the cause, begins. The walls 
are taken away. We lie open on one side to the deeps of spi- 
ritual nature, to the attributes of God. Justice we see and 
know, Love, Freedom, Power. These natures no man ever got 
above, but they tower over us, and most in the moment when 
our interests tempt us to wound them. 

The sovereignty of this nature whereof we speak is made 
known by its independency of those limitations which circum- 
scribe us on every hand. The soul circumscribes all things. 
As I have said, it contradicts all experience. In like manner 
it abolishes time and space. The influence of the senses has, 
in most men, overpowered the mind to that degree, that the 
walls of time and space have come to look real and insurmount- 
able ; and to speak with levity of these limits is, in the world, 
the sign of insanity. Yet time and space are but inverse 
measures of the force of the soul. The spirit sports with 
time, — 



140 ESSAY IX. 

Can crowd eternity into an hour, 
Or stretch an hour to eternity. 

We are often made to feel that there is another youth and age 
than that which is measured from the year of our natural birth. 
Some thoughts always find us young, and keep us so. Such 
a thought is the love of the universal and eternal beauty. Every 
man parts from that contemplation with the feeling that it 
rather belongs to ages than to mortal life. The least activity of 
the intellectual powers redeems us in a degree from the con- 
ditions of time. In sickness, in languor, give us a strain ;of 
poetry, or a profound sentence, and we are refreshed ; or pro- 
duce a volume of Plato, or Shakspeare, or remind us of their 
names, and instantly we come into a feeling of longevity. See 
how the deep, divine thought reduces centuries, and millenniums, 
and makes itself present through all ages. Is the teaching of 
Christ less effective now than it was when first his mouth was 
opened ? The emphasis of facts and persons in my thought 
has nothing to do with time. And so, always, the soul's scale 
is one ; the scale of the senses and the understanding is another. 
Before the revelations of the soul, Time, Space, and Nature 
shrink away. In common speech, we refer all things to time, 
as we habitually refer the immensely-sundered stars to one con- 
cave sphere. And so we say that the Judgment is distant or 
near, that the Millennium approaches, that a day of certain 
political, moral, social reforms is at hand, and the like, when we 
mean, that, in the nature of things, one of the facts we con- 
template is external and fugitive, and the other is permanent 
and connate with the soul. The things we now esteem fixed 
shall, one by one, detach themselves, like ripe fruit, from our 
experience, and fall. The wind shall blow them none knows 
whither. The landscape, the figures, Boston, London, are facts 
as fugitive as any institution past, or any whiff of mist or smoke, 
and so is society, and so is the world. The soul looketh steadily 
forwards, creating a world before her, leaving worlds behind her. 
She has no dates, nor rites, nor persons, nor specialties, nor men. 
The soul knows only the soul ; the web of events is the flowing 
robe in which she is clothed. 

After its own law and not by arithmetic is the rate of its 
progress to be computed. The soul's advances are not made by 
gradation, such as can be represented by motion in a straight 
line ; but rather by ascension of state, such as can be repre- 
sented by metamorphosis, — from the egg to the worm, from the 
worm to the fly. The growths of genius are of a certain total 
character, that does not advance the elect individual first over 



THE OVER-SOUL. 141 

John, then Adam, then Richard, and give to each the pain of 
discovered inferiority, but by every throe of growth the man 
expands there where he works, passing, at each pulsation, classes, 
populations, of men. With each divine impulse the mind rends 
the thin rinds of the visible and finite, and comes out into 
eternity, and inspires and expires its air. It converses with 
truths that have always been spoken in the world, and becomes 
conscious of a closer sympathy with Zeno and Arrian, than with 
persons in the house. 

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple 
rise, as by specific levity, not into a particular virtue, but into 
the region of all the virtues. They are in the spirit which 
contains them all. The soul requires purity, but purity is not 
it : requires justice, but justice is not that ; requires beneficence, 
but is somewhat better ; so that there is a kind of descent and 
accommodation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature, to 
urge a virtue which it enjoins. To the well-born child, all the 
virtues are natural, and not painfully acquired. Speak to his 
heart, and the man becomes suddenly virtuous. 

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual growth, 
which obeys the same law. Those who are capable of humility, 
of justice, of love, of aspiration, stand already on a platform 
that commands the sciences and arts, speech and poetry, action 
and grace. Tor whoso dwells in this moral beatitude already 
anticipates those special powers which men prize so highly. 
The lover has no talent, no skill, which passes for quite nothing 
with his enamoured maiden, however little she may possess of 
related faculty; and the heart which abandons itself to the 
Supreme Mind finds itself related to all its works, and will 
travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. In 
ascending to this primary and aboriginal sentiment, we have 
come from our remote station on the circumference instanta- 
neously to the centre of the world, where, as in the closet of 
God, we see causes, and anticipate the universe, which is but a 
slow effect. 

One mode of the divine teaching is the incarnation of the 
spirit in a form, — in forms, like my own. I live in society ; 
with persons who answer to thoughts in my own mind, or ex- 
press a certain obedience to the great instincts to which I live. 
I see its presence to them. I am certified of a common nature ; 
and these other souls, these separated selves, draw me as nothing 
else can. They stir in me the new emotions we call passion: 
of love, hatred, fear, admiration, pity : thence comes conversa- 
tion, competition, persuasiou, cities, and war. Persons are sup- 



142 ESSAY IX. 

plementary to the primary teaching of the soul. In youth we 
are mad for persons. Childhood and youth see all the world in 
them. But the larger experience of man discovers the iden- 
tical nature appearing through them all. Persons themselves 
acquaint us with the impersonal. In all conversation between 
two persons, tacit reference is made, as to a third party, to a 
common nature. That third party or common nature is not 
social ; it is impersonal ; is God. And so in groups where de- 
bate is earnest, and especially on high questions, the company 
become aware that the thought rises to an equal level in all 
bosoms, that all have a spiritual property in what was said, as 
well as the sayer. They all become wiser than they were. It 
arches over them like a temple, this unity of thought, in which 
every heart beats with nobler sense of power and duty, and 
thinks and acts with unusual solemnity. All are conscious of 
attaining to a higher self-possession. It shines for all. There 
is a certain wisdom of humanity which is common to the greatest 
men with the lowest, and which our ordinary education often 
labors to silence and obstruct. The mind is one, and the best 
minds, who love truth for its own sake, think much less of 
property in truth. They accept it thankfully everywhere, and 
do not label or stamp it with any man's name, for it is theirs 
long beforehand, and from eternity. The learned and the stu- 
dious of thought have no monopoly of wisdom. Their violence 
of direction in some degree disqualifies them to think truly. 
We owe many valuable observations to people who are not very 
acute or profound, and who say the thing without effort, which 
we want, and have long been hunting in vain. The action of 
the soul is oftener in that which is felt and left unsaid, than in 
that which is said in any conversation. It broods over every 
society, and they unconsciously seek for it in each other. We 
know better than we do. ' We do not yet possess ourselves, and 
we know at the same time that we are much more. I feel the 
same truth how often in my trivial conversation with my neigh- 
bours, that somewhat higher in each of us overlooks this by- 
play, and Jove nods to Jove from behind each of us. 

Men descend to meet. In their habitual and mean service to 
the world, for which they forsake their native nobleness, they 
resemble those Arabian sheiks, who dwell in mean houses, and 
affect an external poverty, to escape the rapacity of the Pacha, 
and reserve all their display of wealth for their interior and 
guarded retirements. 

As it is present in all persons, so it is in every period of life. 
It is adult alreadj in the infant man. In my dealing with my 



THE OVER-SOUL. 143 

child, my Latin and Greek, my accomplishments and my money, 
stead me nothing ; but as much soul as I have avails. If I am 
wilful, he sets his will against mine, one for one, and leaves me, 
if I please, the degradation of beating him by my superiority of 
strength. But if I renounce my will, and act for the soul, 
setting that up as umpire between us two, out of his young eyes 
looks the same soul ; he reveres and loves with me. 

The soul is the perceiver and revealer of truth. "We know 
truth when we see it, let sceptic and scoffer say what they choose. 
Foolish people ask you, when you have spoken what they do not 
wish to hear, ( How do you know it is truth, and not an error 
of your own?' We know truth when we see it, from opinion, 
as we know when we are awake that we are awake. It was a 
grand sentence of Emanuel Swedenborg, which would alone indi- 
cate the greatness of that man's perception, — " It is no proof 
of a man's understanding to be able to confirm whatever he 
pleases ; but to be able to discern that what is true is true, and 
that what is false is false, this is the mark and character of 
intelligence." In the book I read, the good thought returns to 
me, as every truth will, the image of the whole soul. To the 
bad thought which I find in it, the same soul becomes a dis- 
cerning, separating sword, and lops it away. We are wiser than 
we know. If we will not interfere with our thought, but will act 
entirely, or see how the thing stands in God, we know the par- 
ticular thing, and every thing, and every man. For the Maker 
of all things and all persons stands behind us, and casts his 
dread omniscience through us over things. 

But beyond this recognition of its own in particular passages 
of the individual's experience, it also reveals truth. And here 
we should seek to reinforce ourselves by its very presence, and 
to speak with a worthier, loftier strain of that advent. For the 
soul's communication of truth is the highest event in nature, 
since it then does not give somewhat from itself, but it gives 
itself, or passes into and becomes that man whom it enlightens ; 
or, in proportion to that truth he receives, it takes him to 
itself. 

We distinguish the announcements of the soul, its manifesta- 
tions of its own nature, by the term Revelation. These are 
always attended by the emotion of the sublime. For this com- 
munication is an influx of the Divine mind into our mind. It 
is an ebb of the individual rivulet before the flowing surges of 
the sea of life. Every distinct apprehension of this central com- 
mandment agitates men with awe and delight. A thrill passes 
through all men at the reception of new truth, or at the per- 



144 ESSAY IX. 






formance of a great action, which comes out of the heart of 
nature. In these communications, the power to see is not sepa- 
rated from the will to do, but the insight proceeds from obe- 
dience, and the obedience proceeds from a joyful perception. 
Every moment when the individuals feels himself invaded by it 
is memorable. By the necessity of our constitution, a certain 
enthusiasm attends the individual's consciousness of that divine 
presence. The character and duration of this enthusiasm varies 
with the state of the individual, from an ecstasy and trance and 
prophetic inspiration, — which is its rarer appearance, — to the 
faintest glow of virtuous emotion, in which form it warms, like 
our household fires, all the families and associations of men, and 
makes society possible. A certain tendency to insanity has 
always attended the opening of the religious sense in men, as if 
they had been " blasted with excess of light." The trances of 
Socrates, the "union" of Plotinus, the vision of Porphyry, the 
conversion of Paul, the aurora of Behmen, the convulsions of 
George Pox and his Quakers, the illumination of Swedenborg, 
are of this kind. What was in the case of these remarkable 
persons a ravishment has, in innumerable instances in common 
life, been exhibited in less striking manner. Everywhere the 
history of religion betrays a tendency to enthusiasm. The rap- 
ture of the Moravian and Quietist ; the opening of the internal 
sense of the Word, in the language of the New Jerusalem 
Church ; the revival of the Calvinistic churches ; the experiences of 
the Methodists, are varying forms of that shudder of awe and 
delight with which the individual soul always mingles with the 
universal soul. 

The nature of these revelations is the same ; they are percep- 
tions of the absolute law. They are solutions of the soul's own 
questions. They do not answer the questions which the under- 
standing asks. The soul answers never by words, but by the 
thing itself that is inquired after. 

Revelation is the disclosure of the soul. The popular notion 
of a revelation is, that it is a telling of fortunes. In past ora- 
cles of the soul, the understanding seeks to find answers to 
sensual questions, and undertakes to tell from God how long 
men shall exist, what their hands shall do, and who shall be their 
company, adding names, and dates, and places. But we must 
pick no locks. We must check this low curiosity. An answer 
in words is delusive ; it is really no answer to the questions you 
ask. Do not require a description of the countries towards 
which you sail. The description does not describe them to you, 
and to-morrow you arrive there, and know them by inhabiting 



THE OVER-SOUL. 145 

them. Men ask concerning the immortality of the soul, the 
employments of heaven, the state of the sinner, and so forth. 
They even dream that Jesus has left replies to precisely these 
interrogatories. Never a moment did that sublime spirit speak 
in their patois. To truth, justice, love, the attributes of the 
soul, the idea of immutableness is essentially associated. Jesus, 
living in these moral sentiments, heedless of sensual fortunes, 
heeding only the manifestations of these, never made the sepa- 
ration of the idea of duration from the essence of these attri- 
butes, nor uttered a syllable concerning the duration of the 
soul. It was left to his disciples to sever duration from the 
moral elements, and to teach the immortality of the soul as a 
doctrine, and maintain it by evidences. The moment the doc- 
trine of the immortality is separately taught, man is already 
fallen. In the flowing of love, in the adoration of humility, 
there is no question of continuance. No inspired man ever asks 
this question, or condescends to these evidences. Por the soul 
is true to itself, and the man in whom it is shed abroad cannot 
wander from the present, which is infinite, to a future, which 
would be finite. 

These questions which we lust to ask about the future are a 
confession of sin. God has no answer for them. No answer in 
words can reply to a question of things. It is not in an arbi- 
trary " decree of God," but in the nature of man, that a veil 
shuts down on the facts of to-morrow ; for the soul will not 
have us read any other cipher than that of cause and effect. 
By this veil, which curtains events, it instructs the children of 
men to live in to-day. The only mode of obtaining an answer 
to these questions of the senses is, to forego all low curiosity, 
and, accepting the tide of being which floats us into the secret 
of nature, work and live, work and live ; and all unawares the 
advancing soul has built and forged for itself a new condition, 
and the question and the answer are one. 

By the same fire, vital, consecrating, celestial, which burns 
until it shall dissolve all things into the waves and surges of an 
ocean of light, we see and know each other, and what spirit each 
is of. Who can tell the grounds of his knowledge of the cha- 
racter of the several individuals in his circle of friends ? No 
man. Yet their acts and words do not disappoint him. In 
that man, though he knew no ill of him, he put no trust. In 
that other, though they had seldom met, authentic signs had 
yet passed, to signify that he might be trusted as one who had 
an interest in his own character. We know each other very 
well, — which of us has been just to himself, and whether that 

H 



146 ESSAY IX. 

which we teach or behold is only an aspiration, or is our honest 
effort also. 

We are all discerners of spirits. That diagnosis lies aloft in 
our life or unconscious power. The intercourse of society, — its 
trade, its religion, its friendships, its quarrels, — is one wide, 
judicial investigation of character. In full court, or in small 
committee, or confronted face to face, accuser and accused, men 
offer themselves to be judged. Against their will they exhibit 
those decisive trifles by which character is read. But who 
judges? and what? Not our understanding. We do not read 
them by learning or craft. No ; the wisdom of the wise man 
consists herein, that he does not judge them ; he lets them judge 
themselves, and merely reads and records their own verdict. 

By virtue of this inevitable nature, private will is over- 
powered, and, maugre our efforts or our imperfections, your 
genius will speak from you, and mine from me. That which 
we are, we shall teach, not voluntarily, but involuntarily. 
Thoughts come into our minds by avenues which we never left 
open, and thoughts go out of our minds through avenues which 
we never voluntarily opened. Character teaches over our head. 
The infallible index of true progress is found in the tone the 
man takes. Neither his age, nor his breeding, nor company, 
nor books, nor actions, nor talents, nor all together, can hinder 
him from being deferential to a higher spirit than his own. If 
he have not found his home in God, his manners, his forms of 
speech, the turn of his sentences, the build, shall I say, of all 
his opinions, will involuntarily confess it, let him brave it out 
how he will. If he have found his centre, the Deity will shine 
through him, through all the disguises of ignorance, of ungenial 
temperament, of unfavorable circumstance. The tone of seeking 
is one, and the tone of having is another. 

The great distinction between teachers sacred or literary, — 
between poets like Herbert, and poets like Pope, — between 
philosophers like Spinoza, Kant, and Coleridge, and philoso- 
phers like Locke, Paley, Mackintosh, and Stewart, — between 
men of the world, who are reckoned accomplished talkers, 
and here and there a fervent mystic, prophesying, half insane 
under the infinitude of his thought, — is, that one class speak 
from within, or from experience, as parties and possessors 
of the fact; and the other class, from without, as spectators 
merely, or perhaps as acquainted with the fact on the evidence 
of third persons. It is of no use to preach to me from without. 
I can do that too easily myself. Jesus speaks always from 
within, and in a degree that transcends all others. In that is 



THE OVER-SOUL. 147 

the miracle. I believe beforehand that it ought so to be. All 
men stand continually in the expectation of the appearance of 
such a teacher. But if a man do not speak from within the 
veil, where the word is one with that it tells of, let him lowly 
confess it. 

The same Omniscience flows into the intellect, and makes 
what we call genius. Much of the wisdom of the world is not 
wisdom, and the most illuminated class of men are no doubt 
superior to literary fame, and are not writers. Among the 
multitude of scholars and authors, we feel no hallowing pre- 
sence ; we are sensible of a knack and skill rather than of inspira- 
tion ; they have a light, and know not whence it comes, and call 
it their own; their talent is some exaggerated faculty, some 
overgrown member, so that their strength is a disease. In these 
instances the intellectual gifts do not make the impression of 
virtue, but almost of vice ; and we feel that a man's talents 
stand in the way of his advancement in truth. But genius is 
religious. It is a larger imbibing of the common heart. It is 
not anomalous, but more like, and not less like other men. 
There is, in all great poets, a wisdom of humanity which is supe- 
rior to any talents they exercise. The author, the wit, the par- 
tisan, the fine gentleman, does not take place of the man. 
Humanity shines in Homer, in Chaucer, in Spenser, in Shak- 
speare, in Milton. They are content with truth. They use the 
positive degree. They seem frigid and phlegmatic to those who 
have been spiced with the frantic passion and violent coloring 
of inferior but popular writers. For they are poets by the free 
course which they allow to the informing soul, which through 
their eyes beholds again, and blesses the things which it hath 
made. The soul is superior to its knowledge; wiser than any 
of its works. The great poet makes us feel our own wealth, 
and then we think less of his compositions. His best commu- 
nication to our mind is to teach us to despise all he has done. 
Shakspeare carries us to such a lofty strain of intelligent activity, 
as to suggest a wealth which beggars his own ; and we then feel 
that the splendid works which he has created, and which in 
other hours we extol as a sort of self-existent poetry, take no 
stronger hold of real nature than the shadow of a passing 
traveller on the rock. The inspiration which uttered itself in 
Hamlet and Lear could utter things as good from day to day, 
for ever. Why, then, should I make account of Hamlet and 
Lear, as if we had not the soul from which they fell as syllables 
from the tongue ? 

This energy does not descend into individual life on any other 

H 2 



148 ESSAY JX. 

condition than entire possession. It comes to the lowly and 
simple ; it comes to whomsoever will put off what is foreign and 
proud ; it comes as insight ; it comes as serenity and grandeur. 
When we see those whom it inhabits, we are apprised of new 
degrees of greatness. From that inspiration the man comes back 
with a changed tone. He does not talk with men with an eye 
to their opinion. He tries them. It requires of us to be plain 
and true. The vain traveller attempts to embellish his life by 
quoting my lord, and the prince, and the countess, who thus said 
or did to Mm. The ambitious vulgar show you their spoons, 
and brooches, and rings, and preserve their cards and compli- 
ments. The more cultivated, in their account of their own ex- 
perience, cull out the pleasing, poetic circumstance, — the visit to 
Rome, the man of genius they saw, the brilliant friend they 
know; still farther on, perhaps, the gorgeous landscape, the 
mountain lights, the mountain thoughts, they enjoyed yesterday, 
— and so seek to throw a romantic color over their life. But 
the soul that ascends to worship the great God is plain and true ; 
has no rose-color, no fine friends, no chivalry, no adventures ; 
does not want admiration ; dwells in the hour that now is, in 
the earnest experience of the common day, — by reason of the 
present moment and the mere trifle having become porous to 
thought, and bibulous of the sea of light. 

Converse with a mind that is grandly simple, and literature 
looks like word-catching. The simplest utterances are worthiest 
to be written, yet are they so cheap, and so things of course, 
that, in the infinite riches of the soul, it is like gathering a few 
pebbles off the ground, or bottling a little air in a phial, when 
the whole earth and the whole atmosphere are ours. Nothing- 
can pass there, or make you one of the circle, but the casting 
aside your trappings, and dealing man to man in naked truth, 
plain confession, and omniscient affirmation. 

Souls such as these treat you as gods would; walk as gods 
in the earth, accepting without any admiration your wit, your 
bounty, your virtue even, — say rather, your act of duty, for your 
virtue they own as their proper blood, royal as themselves, and 
over-royal, and the father of the gods. But what rebuke their 
plain fraternal bearing casts on the mutual flattery with which 
authors solace each other and wound themselves ! These flatter 
not. I do not wonder that these men go to see Cromwell, and 
Christina, and Charles the Second, and James the First, and the 
Grand Turk. For they are, in their own elevation, the fellows 
of kings, and must feel the servile tone of conversation in the 
world. They must always be a godsend to princes, for they 



THE OVER-SOUL. 149 

confront them, a king to a king, without ducking or concession, 
and give a high nature the refreshment and satisfaction of re- 
sistance, of plain humanity, of even companionship, and of new 
ideas. They leave them wiser and superior men. Souls like 
these make us feel that sincerity is more excellent than flattery. 
Deal so plainly with man and woman, as to constrain the utmost 
sincerity, and destroy all hope of trifling with you. It is the 
highest compliment you can pay. Their "highest praising," 
said Milton, " is not flattery, and their plainest advice is a kind 
of praising." 

Ineffable is the union of man and God in every act of the 
soul. The simplest person, who in his integrity worships God, 
becomes God ; yet for ever and ever the influx of this better 
and universal self is new and unsearchable. It inspires awe and 
astonishment. How dear, how soothing to man, arises the idea 
of God, peopling the lonely place, effacing the scars of our 
mistakes and disappointments ! When we have broken our god 
of tradition, and ceased from our god of rhetoric, then may God 
fire the heart with his presence. It is the doubling of the heart 
itself, nay, the infinite enlargement of the heart with a power of 
growth to a new infinity on every side. It inspires in man an 
infallible trust. He has not the conviction, but the sight, that 
the best is the true, and may in that thought easily dismiss all 
particular uncertainties and fears, and adjourn to the sure reve- 
lation of time, the solution of his private riddles. He is sure 
that his welfare is dear to the heart of being. In the presence 
of law to his mind, he is overflowed with a reliance so universal, 
that it sweeps away all cherished hopes and the most stable 
projects of mortal condition in its flood. He believes that he 
cannot escape from his good. The things that are really for 
thee gravitate to thee. You are running to seek your friend. 
Let your feet run, but your mind need not. If you do not find 
him, will you not acquiesce that it is best you should not find 
him ? for there is a power, which, as it is in you, is in him also, 
and could therefore very well bring you together, if it were for 
the best. You are preparing with eagerness to go and render a 
service to which your talent and your taste invite you, the love 
of men and the hope of fame. Has it not occurred to you, that 
you have no right to go, unless you are equally willing to be 
prevented from going? 0, believe, as thou livest, that every 
sound that is spoken over the round world, which thou oughtest 
to hear, will vibrate on thine ear ! Every proverb, every book, 
every byword that belongs to thee for aid or comfort, shall 
surely come home through open or winding passages. Every 



150 ESSAY IX. 

friend whom not thy fantastic will, but the great and tender 
heart in thee craveth, shall lock thee in his embrace. And this, 
because the heart in thee is the heart of all ; not a valve, not a 
wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one 
blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all 
men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its 
tide is one. 

Let man, then, learn the revelation of all nature and all 
thought to his heart ; this, namely, that the Highest dwells with 
him ; that the sources of nature are in his own mind, if the sen- 
timent of duty is there. But if he would know what the great 
God speaketh, he must ' go into his closet and shut the door, 5 
as Jesus said. God will not make himself manifest to cowards. 
He must greatly listen to himself, withdrawing himself from all 
the accents of other men's devotion. Even their prayers are 
hurtful to him, until he have made his own. Our religion vul- 
garly stands on numbers of believers. Whenever the appeal is 
made — no matter how indirectly — to numbers, proclamation is 
then and there made, that religion is not. He that finds God a 
sweet, enveloping thought to him never counts his company. 
When I sit in that presence, who shall dare to come in ? When 
I rest in perfect humility, when I burn with pure love, what can 
Calvin or Swedenborg say ? 

It makes no difference whether the appeal is to numbers or to 
one. The faith that stands on authority is not faith. The reli- 
ance on authority measures the decline of religion, the with- 
drawal of the soul. The position men have given to Jesus, now 
for many centuries of history, is a position of authority. It 
characterizes themselves. It cannot alter the eternal facts. 
Great is the soul, and plain. It is no flatterer, it is no follower ; 
it never appeals from itself. It believes in itself. Before the 
immense possibilities of man, all mere experience, all past 
biography, however spotless and sainted, shrinks away. Before 
that heaven which our presentiments foreshow us, we cannot 
easily praise any form of life we have seen or read of. We not 
only affirm that we have few great men, but, absolutely speaking, 
that we have none ; that we have no history, no record of any 
character or mode of living, that entirely contents us. The 
saints and demigods whom history worships we are constrained 
to accept with a grain of allowance. Though in our lonely 
hours we draw a new strength out of their memory, yet, pressed 
on our attention, as they are by the thoughtless and customary, 
they fatigue and invade. The soul gives itself, alone, original, 
and pure, to the Lonely, Original, and Pure, who, on that con- 



THE OVER-SOUL. 151 

dition, gladly inhabits, leads, and speaks through it. Then is 
it glad, young, and nimble. It is not wise, but it sees through 
all things. It is not called religious, but it is innocent. It calls 
the light its own, and feels that the grass grows and the stone 
falls by a law inferior to, and dependent on, its nature. Behold, 
it saith, I am born into the great, the universal mind. I, the 
imperfect, adore my own Perfect. I am somehow^ receptive of the 
great soul, and thereby I do overlook the sun and the stars, and 
feel them to be the fair accidents and effects w 7 hich change and 
pass. More and more the surges of everlasting nature enter 
into me, and I become public and human in my regards and 
actions. So come I to live in thoughts, and act with energies, 
which are immortal. Thus revering the soul, and. learning, as 
the ancient said, that " its beauty is immense," man will come 
to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul 
worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders ; he will 
learn that there is no profane history ; that all history is sacred ; 
that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of 
time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and 
patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from 
what is base and frivolous in his life, and be content with all 
places and with any service he can render. He will calmly front 
the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God 
with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of 
the heart. 



CIRCLES. 



Nature centres into balls, 
And her proud ephemerals, 
Fast to surface and outside, 
Scan the profile of the sphere ; 
Knew they what that signified, 
A new genesis were here. 



H 3 



ESSAY X. 

CIRCLES. 



The eye is the first circle ; the horizon which it forms is the 
second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated 
without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the 
world. St. Augustine described the nature of God as a circle 
whose centre was everywhere, and its circumference nowhere. 
We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of 
forms. One moral we have already deduced, in considering 
the circular or compensatory character of every human action. 
Another analogy we shall now trace ; that every action admits 
of being outdone. Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, 
that around every circle another can be drawn ; that there is no 
end in nature, but every end is a beginning ; that there is always 
another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower 
deep opens. 

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unat- 
tainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can 
never meet, at once the inspirer and condemner of every suc- 
cess, may conveniently serve us to connect many illustrations of 
human power in every department. 

There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and 
volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen 
by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dis- 
solves the fact and holds it fluid. Our culture is the pre- 
dominance of an idea which draws after it this train of cities and 
institutions. Let us rise into another idea : they will disappear. 
The Greek sculpture is all melted away, as if it had been statues 
of ice ; here and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining, 
as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and 
mountain clefts, in June and July. Tor the genius that created 



156 ESSAY X. 

it creates now somewhat else. The Greek letters last a little 
longer, but are already passing under the same sentence, and 
tumbling into the inevitable pit which the creation of new thought 
opens for all that is old. The new continents are built out of 
the ruins of an old planet ; the new races fed out of the decom- 
position of the foregoing. New arts destroy the old. See the 
investment of capital in aqueducts made useless by hydraulics ; 
fortifications, by gunpowder; roads and canals, by railways; 
sails, by steam ; steam, by electricity. 

You admire this tower of granite, weathering the hurts of so 
many ages. Yet a little waving hand built this huge wall, and 
that which builds is better than that which is built. The hand 
that built can topple it down much faster. Better than the hand, 
and nimbler, was the invisible thought which wrought through 
it ; and thus ever, behind the coarse effect, is a fine cause, which, 
being narrowly seen, is itself the effect of a finer cause. Every- 
thing looks permanent until its secret is known. A rich estate 
appears to women a firm and lasting fact ; to a merchant, one 
easily created out of any materials, and easily lost. An or- 
chard, good tillage, good grounds, seem a fixture like a gold 
mine, or a river, to a citizen ; but to a large farmer, not much 
more fixed than the state of the crop. Nature looks provokingly 
stable and secular, but it has a cause like all the rest ; and when 
once I comprehend that, will these fields stretch so immovably 
wide, these leaves hang so individually considerable ? Perma- 
nence is a word of degrees. Everything is medial. Moons are 
no more bounds to spiritual power than bat-balls. 

The key to every man is his thought. Sturdy and defying 
though he look, he has a helm which he obeys, which is the idea 
after which all his facts are classified. He can only be reformed 
by showing him a new idea which commands his own. The life 
of man is a self-evolving circle, which, from a ring imper- 
ceptibly small, rushes on all sides outwards to new and larger 
circles, and that without end. The extent to which this genera- 
tion of circles, wheel without wheel, will go, depends on the 
force or truth of the individual soul. Eor it is the inert effort of 
each thought, having formed itself into a circular wave of cir- 
cumstance, — as, for instance, an empire, rules of an art, a local 
usage, a religious rite, — to heap itself on that ridge, and to 
solidify and hem in the life. But if the soul is quick and strong, 
it bursts over that boundary on all sides, and expands another 
orbit on the great deep, which also runs up into a high wave, 
with attempt again to stop and to bind. But the heart refuses 
to be imprisoned \ in its first and narrowest pulses, it already 



CIRCLES. 157 

tends outwards with a vast force, and to immense and innu- 
merable expansions. 

Every ultimate fact is only the first of a new series ; every 
general Jaw only a particular fact of some more general law pre- 
sently to disclose itself. There is no outside, no inclosing wall, 
no circumference to us. The man finishes his story, — how 
good ! how final ! how it puts a new face on all things ! He 
fills the sky. Lo ! on the other side rises also a man, and 
draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline 
of the sphere. Then already is our first speaker not man, but 
only a first speaker. His only redress is forthwith to draw a 
circle outside of his antagonist. And so men do by themselves. 
The result of to-day, which haunts the mind and cannot be 
escaped, will presently be abridged into a word, and the principle 
that seemed to explain nature will itself be included as one ex- 
ample of a bolder generalization. In the thought of to-morrow 
there is a power to upheave all thy creed, all the creeds, all the 
literatures, of the nations, and marshal thee to a heaven which 
no epic dream has yet depicted. Every man is not so much 
a workman in the world, as he is a suggestion of that he should 
be. Men walk as prophecies of the next age. 

Step by step we scale this mysterious ladder : the steps are 
actions; the new prospect is power. Every several result is 
threatened and judged by that which follows. Every one seems 
to be contradicted by the new ; it is only limited by the new. 
The new statement is always hated by the old, and, to those 
dwelling in the old, comes like an abyss of scepticism. But the 
eye soon gets wonted to it, for the eye and it are effects of one 
cause; then its innocency and benefit appear, and presently, all 
its energy spent, it pales and dwindles before the revelation of 
the new hour. 

Tear not the new generalization. Does the fact look crass and 
material, threatening to degrade thy theory of spirit ? Resist it 
not ; it goes to refine and raise thy theory of matter just as 
much. 

There are no fixtures to men, if we appeal to consciousness. 
Every man supposes himself not to be fully understood ; and if 
there is any truth in him, if he rests at last on the divine soul, 
I see not how it can be otherwise. The last chamber, the last 
closet, he must feel, was never opened ; there is always a re- 
siduum unknown, unanalyzable. That is, every man believes 
that he has a greater possibility. 

Our moods do not believe in each other. To-day I am full of 
thoughts, and can write what I please. I see no reason why I 



158 ESSAY X. 

should not have the same thought, the same power of expression, 
to-morrow. What I write, whilst I write it, seems the most 
natural thing in the world ; but yesterday I saw a dreary vacuity 
in this direction in which now I see so much; and a month 
hence, I doubt not, I shall wonder who he was who wrote so 
many continuous pages. Alas for this infirm faith, this will not 
strenuous, this vast ebb of a vast flow ! I am God in nature : I 
am a weed by the wall. 

The continual efTort to raise himself above himself, to work 
a pitch above his last height, betrays itself in a man's relations. 
We thirst for approbation, yet cannot forgive the approver. The 
sweet of nature is love ; yet, if I have a friend, I am tormented 
by my imperfections. The love of me accuses the other party. 
If he were high enough to slight me, then could I love him, and 
rise by my affection to new heights. A man's growth is seen in 
the successive choirs of his friends. For every friend whom he 
loses for truth, he gains a better. I thought, as I walked in the 
woods and mused on my friends, why should I play with them 
this game of idolatry ? I know and see too well, when not 
voluntarily blind, the speedy limits of persons called high and 
worthy. Rich, noble, and great they are by the liberality of our 
speech, but truth is sad. O blessed Spirit, whom I forsake for 
these, they are not thou ! Every personal consideration that we 
allow costs us heavenly state. We sell the thrones of angels for 
a short and turbulent pleasure. 

How often must we learn this lesson ? Men cease to interest 
us when we find their limitations. The only sin is limitation. 
As soon as you once come up with a man's limitations, it is all 
over with him. Has he talents ? has he enterprise ? has he 
knowledge ? it boots not. Infinitely alluring and attractive was 
he to you yesterday, a great hope, a sea to swim in ; now, you 
have found his shores, found it a pond, and you care not if you 
never see it again. 

Each new step we take in thought reconciles twenty seemingly 
discordant facts, as expressions of one law. Aristotle and Plato 
are reckoned the respective heads of two schools. A wise man 
will see that Aristotle Platonizes. By going one step farther 
back in thought, discordant opinions are reconciled, by being seen 
to be two extremes of one principle, and we can never go so far 
back as to preclude a still higher vision. 

Beware when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. 
Then all things are at risk. It is as when a conflagration has 
broken out in a great city, and no man knows what is safe, or 
where it will end. There is not a piece of science, but its flank 



CIRCLES. 159 

may be turned to-morrow ; there is not any literary reputation, 
not the so-called eternal names of fame, that may not be re- 
vised and condemned. The very hopes of man, the thoughts of 
his heart, the religion of nations, the manners and morals of 
mankind, are all at the mercy of a new generalization. Gene- 
ralization is always a new influx of the divinity into the mind. 
Hence the thrill that attends it. 

Yalor consists in the power of self-recovery, so that a man 
cannot have his flank turned, cannot be out-generalled, but 
put him where you will, he stands. This can only be by his 
preferring truth to his past apprehension of truth, and his alert 
acceptance of it, from whatever quarter : the intrepid conviction 
that his laws, his relations to society, his Christianity, his world, 
may at any time be superseded and decease. 

There are degrees in idealism. We learn first to play with it 
academically, as the magnet was once a toy. Then we see in 
the heyday of youth and poetry that it may be true, that it is 
true in gleams and fragments. Then, its countenance waxes stern 
and grand, and we see that it must be true. It now shows 
itself ethical and practical. We learn that God is ; that he is 
in me ; and that all things are shadows of him. The idealism 
of Berkeley is only a crude statement of the idealism of Jesus, 
and that again is a crude statement of the fact, that all nature is 
the rapid efflux of goodness executing and organizing itself. Much 
more obviously is history and the state of the world at any one 
time directly depeudent on the intellectual classification then 
existing in the minds of men. The things which are dear to 
men at this hour are so on account of the ideas which have 
emerged on their mental horizon, and which cause the present 
order of things as a tree bears its apples. A new degree of 
culture would instantly revolutionize the entire system of human 
pursuits. 

Conversation is a game of circles. In conversation we pluck 
up the termini which bound the common of silence on every side. 
The parties are not to be judged by the spirit they partake and 
even express under this Pentecost. To-morrow they will have 
receded from this high-water mark. To-morrow you shall find 
them stooping under the old pack-saddles. Yet let us enjoy the 
cloven flame whilst it glows on our walls. "When each new 
speaker strikes a new light, emancipates us from the oppression 
of the last speaker, to oppress us with the greatness and ex- 
clusiveness of his own thought, then yields us to another re- 
deemer, we seem to recover our rights, to become men. 0, what 
truths profound and executable only in ages and orbs are sup- 



160 ESSAY X. 

posed in the announcement of every truth ! In common hours, 
society sits cold and statuesque. We all stand waiting, empty, 
— knowing, possibly, that we can be full, surrounded by mighty 
symbols which are not symbols to us, but prose and trivial toys. 
Then cometh the god, and converts the statues into fiery men, 
and by a flash of his eye burns up the veil which shrouded all 
things, and the meaning of the very furniture, of cup and saucer, 
of chair and clock and tester, is manifest. The facts which 
loomed so large in the fogs of yesterday, — property, climate, 
breeding, personal beauty, and the like, — have strangely changed 
their proportions. All that we reckoned settled shakes and 
rattles ; and literatures, cities, climates, religions, leave their 
foundations, and dance before our eyes. And yet here again see 
the swift circumspection ! Good as is discourse, silence is 
better, and shames it. The length of the discourse indicates 
the distance of thought betwixt the speaker and the hearer. If 
they were at a perfect understanding in any part, no words would 
be necessary thereon. If at one in all parts, no words would be 
suffered. 

Literature is a point outside of our hodiernal circle, through 
which a new one may be described. The use of literature is to 
afford us a platform whence we may command a view of our 
present life, a purchase by which we may move it. We fill our- 
selves with ancient learning, install ourselves the best we can in 
Greek, in Punic, in Roman houses, only that we may wiselier 
see Trench, English, and American houses and modes of living. 
In like manner, we see literature best from the midst of wild 
nature, or from the din of affairs, or from a high religion. The 
field cannot be well seen from within the field. The astronomer 
must have his diameter of the earth's orbit as a base to find the 
parallax of any star. 

Therefore we value the poet. All the argument and all the 
wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on meta- 
physics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play. 
In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps, and do not 
believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. 
But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine of his 
imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of daring 
thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill 
tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye 
on my own possibilities. He claps wings to the sides of all the 
solid old lumber of the world, and I am capable once more of 
choosing a straight path in theory and practice. 

We have the same need to command a view of the religion of 






CIRCLES. 161 

the world. We can never see Christianity from the catechism : 
— from the pastures, from a boat in the pond, from amidst the 
songs of woodbirds, we possibly may. Cleansed by the elemental 
light and wind, steeped in the sea of beautiful forms which the 
field offers us, we may chance to cast a right glance back upon 
biography. Christianity is rightly dear to the best of man- 
kind ; yet was there never a young philosopher whose breeding 
had fallen into the Christian church, by whom that brave text of 
Paul's was not specially prized : — " Then shall also the Son be 
subject unto Him who put all things under him, that God may 
be all in all." Let the claims and virtues of persons be never 
so great and welcome, the instinct of man presses eagerly 
onward to the impersonal and illimitable, and gladly arms itself 
against the dogmatism of bigots with this generous word out of 
the book itself. 

The natural world may be conceived of as a system of concen- 
tric circles, and we now and then detect in nature slight dislo- 
cations, which apprize us that this surface on which we now 
stand is not fixed, but sliding. These manifold tenacious quali- 
ties, this chemistry and vegetation, these metals and animals, 
which seem to stand there for their own sake, are means and 
methods only, — are words of God, and as fugitive as other 
words. Has the naturalist or chemist learned his craft, who 
has explored the gravity of atoms and the elective affinities, who 
has not yet discerned the deeper law whereof this is only a 
partial or approximate statement, namely, that like draws to 
like; and that the goods which belong to you gravitate to 
you, and need not be pursued with pains and cost? Yet is 
that statement approximate also, and not final. Omnipresence 
is a higher fact. Not through subtle, subterranean channels 
need friend and fact be drawn to their counterpart, but, rightly 
considered, these things proceed from the eternal generation of 
the soul. Cause and effect are two sides of one fact. 

The same law of eternal procession ranges all that we call 
the virtues, and extinguishes each in the light of a better. 
The great man will not be prudent in the popular sense; all 
his prudence will be so much deduction from his grandeur. 
But it behoves each to see, when he sacrifices prudence, to what 
god he devotes it ; if to ease and pleasure, he had better be 
prudent still; if to a great trust, he can well spare his mule 
and panniers who has a winged chariot instead. Geoffrey draws 
on his boots to go through the woods, that his feet may be safer 
from the bite of snakes; Aaron never thinks of such a peril. 
In many years neither is harmed by such an accident. Yet it 



162 ESSAY X. 



seems to me, that, with every precaution you take against such 
an evil, you put yourself into the power of the evil. I suppose 
that the highest prudence is the lowest prudence. Is this too 
sudden a rushing from the centre to the verge of our orbit? 
Think how many times we shall fall back into pitiful calcula- 
tions before we take up our rest in the great sentiment, or 
make the verge of to-day the new centre. Besides, your bravest 
sentiment is familiar to the humblest men. The poor and the 
low have their way of expressing the last facts of philosophy 
as well as you. " Blessed be nothing," and " the worse things 
are, the better they are/ 5 are proverbs which express the tran- 
scendentalism of common life. 

One man's justice is another's injustice ; one man's beauty, 
another's ugliness; one man's wisdom, another's folly; as one 
beholds the same objects from a higher point. One man thinks 
justice consists in paying debts, and has no measure in his 
abhorrence of another who is very remiss in this duty, and 
makes the creditor wait tediously. But that second man has 
his own way of looking at things; asks himself, which debt 
must I pay first, the debt to the rich, or the debt to the poor ? 
the debt of money, or the debt of thought to mankind, of 
genius to nature ? Eor you, O broker ! there is no other prin- 
ciple but arithmetic. Tor me, commerce is of trivial import ; 
love, faith, truth of character, the aspiration of man, these are 
sacred; nor can I detach one duty, like you, from all other 
duties, and concentrate my forces mechanically on the payment 
of moneys. Let me live onward ; you shall find that, though 
slower, the progress of my character will liquidate all these 
debts without injustice to higher claims. If a man should 
dedicate himself to the payment of notes, would not this be 
injustice? Does he owe no debt but money? And are all claims 
on him to be postponed to a landlord's or a banker's ? 

There is no virtue which is final ; all are initial. The virtues 
of society are vices of the saint. The terror of reform is the 
discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have 
always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our 
grosser vices. 

Forgive his crimes, forgive his virtues too, 
Those smaller faults, half converts to the right. 

It is the highest power of divine moments that they abolish 
our contritions also. I accuse myself of sloth and unprofitable- 
ness day by day ; but when these waves of God flow into me, I 
no longer reckon lost time. I no longer poorly compute my 






CIRCLES. 163 

possible achievement by what remains to me of the month or the 
year ; for these moments confer a sort of omnipresence and omni- 
potence which asks nothing of duration, but sees that the energy 
of the mind is commensurate with the work to be done^without 
time. 

And thus, O circular philosopher, I hear some reader exclaim, 
you have arrived at a fine Pyrrhonism, at an equivalence and 
indifferency of all actions, and would fain teach us that, if we are 
true, forsooth, our crimes may be lively stones out of which we 
shall construct the temple of the true Grod ! 

I am not careful to justify myself. I own I am gladdened by 
seeing the predominance of the saccharine principle throughout 
vegetable nature, and not less by beholding in morals that unre- 
strained inundation of the principle of good into every chink and 
hole that selfishness has left open, yea, into selfishness and sin 
itself; so that no evil is pure, nor hell itself without its extreme 
satisfactions. But lest I should mislead any when I have my 
own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I 
am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I 
do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to 
settle anything as true or false. I unsettle all things. No 
facts are to me sacred ; none are profane ; I simply experiment, 
an endless seeker, with no Past at my back. 

Yet this incessant movement and progression which all things 
partake could never become sensible to us but by contrast to 
some principle of fixture or stability in the soul. Whilst the 
eternal generation of circles proceeds, the eternal generator 
abides. That central life is somewhat superior to creation, 
superior to knowledge and thought, and contains ail its circles. 
For ever it labors to create a life and thought as large and 
excellent as itself; but in vain ;> for that which is made instructs 
how to make a better. 

Thus there is no sleep, no pause, no preservation, but all 
things renew, germinate, and spring. Why should we import 
rags and relics into the new hour? Nature abhors the old, and 
old age seems the only disease ; all others run into this one. We 
call it by many names, — fever, intemperance, insanity, stupidity, 
and crime ; they are all forms of old age ; they are rest, conser- 
vatism, appropriation, inertia, not newness, not the way onward. 
We grizzle every day. I see no need of it. Whilst we converse 
with what is above us, we do not grow old, but grow young. 
Infancy, youth, receptive, aspiring, with religious eye looking 
upward, counts itself nothing, and abandons itself to the instruc- 
tion flowing from all sides. But the man and woman of seventy 



164 ESSAY X. 

assume to know all, they have outlived their hope, they renounce 
aspiration, accept the actual for the necessary, and talk down to 
the young. Let them, then, become organs of the Holy Ghost ; 
let them be lovers ; let them behold truth ; and their eyes are 
uplifted, their wrinkles smoothed, they are perfumed again with 
hope and power. This old age ought not to creep on a human 
mind. In nature every moment is new; the past is always 
swallowed and forgotten ; the coming only is sacred. Nothing 
is secure but life, transition, the energizing spirit. No love 
can be bound by oath or covenant to secure it against a higher 
love. No truth so sublime, but it may be trivial to-morrow in 
the light of new thoughts. People wish to be settled ; only as 
far as they are unsettled is there any hope for them. 

Life is a series of surprises. We do not guess to-day the 
mood, the pleasure, the power of to-morrow, when we are build- 
ing up our being. Of lower states, — of acts of routine and 
sense, — we can tell somewhat ; but the masterpieces of God, 
the total growths and universal movements of the soul, he 
hideth ; they are incalculable. I can know that truth is divine 
and helpful ; but how it shall help me I can have no guess, for 
so to be is the sole inlet of so to know. The new position of the 
advancing man has all the powers of the old, yet has them all 
new. It carries in its bosom all the energies of the past, yet is 
itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast away in this new 
moment all my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain. 
Now, for the first time, seem I to know anything rightly. The 
simplest words, — we do not know what they mean, except when 
we love and aspire. 

The difference between talents and character is adroitness to 
keep the old and trodden round, and power and courage to make 
a new road to new and better goals. Character makes an over- 
powering present ; a cheerful, determined hour, which fortifies 
all the company, by making them see that much is possible and 
excellent that was not thought of. Character dulls the im- 
pression of particular events. When we see the conqueror, we 
do not think much of any one battle or success. We see that 
we had exaggerated the difficulty. It was easy to him. The 
great man is not convulsible or tormentable ; events pass over 
him without much impression. People say sometimes, " See 
what I have overcome ; see how cheerful I am ; see how com- 
pletely I have triumphed over these black events." Not if they 
still remind me of the black event. True conquest is the causing 
the calamity to fade and disappear, as an early cloud of insig- 
nificant result in a history so large and advancing. 



CIRCLES. 165 

The one thing which we seek with insatiable desire is, to for- 
get ourselves, to be surprised out of our propriety, to lose our 
sempiternal memory, and to do something without knowing how 
or why ; in short, to draw a new circle. Nothing great was 
ever achieved without enthusiasm. The way of life is wonder- 
ful : it is by abandonment. The great moments of history are 
the facilities of performance through the strength of ideas, as 
the works of genius and religion. " A man," said Oliver Crom- 
well, " never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is 
going." Dreams and drunkenness, the use of opium and 
alcohol, are the semblance and counterfeit of this oracular genius, 
and hence their dangerous attraction for men. Tor the like 
reason, they ask the aid of wild passions, as in gaming and 
war, to ape in some manner these flames and generosities of the 
heart. 



INTELLECT. 



Go, speed the stars :: Thought 
On to their shining goals : 
The sower scatters broad his seed. 
ifzew'si be 



ESSAY XL 

INTELLECT. 



Every substance is negatively electric to that which stands 
above it in the chemical tables, positively to that which stands 
below it. Water dissolves wood, and iron, and salt ; air dis- 
solves water : electric fire dissolves air : but the intellect dissolves 
fire, gravity, laws, method, and the subtlest unnamed relations 
of nature, in its resistless menstruum. Intellect lies behind 
genius, which is intellect constructive. Intellect is the simple 
power anterior to all action or construction. G-ladly would I 
unfold in calm degrees a natural history of the intellect, but 
what man has yet been able to mark the steps and boundaries 
of that transparent essence ? The first questions are always to 
be asked, and the wisest doctor is gravelled by the inquisitive- 
ness of a child. How can we speak of the action of the mind 
under any divisions, as of its knowledge, of its ethics, of its 
works, and so forth, since it melts will into perception, know- 
ledge into act ? Each becomes the other. Itself alone is. Its 
vision is not like the vision of the eye, but is union with the 
things known. 

Intellect and intellection signify to the common ear consider- 
ation of abstract truth. The considerations of time and place, 
of you and me, of profit and hurt, tyrannize over most men's 
minds. Intellect separates the fact considered from you, from 
all local and personal reference, and discerns it as if it existed 
for its own sake. Heraclitus looked upon the affections as dense 
and coloured mists. In the fog of good and evil affections, it 
is hard for man to walk forward in a straight line. Intellect is 
void of affection, and sees an object as it stands in the light of 
science, cool and disengaged. The intellect goes out of the 
individual, floats over its own personality, and regards it as a 

I 



170 ESSAY XI. 

fact, and not as I and mine. He who is immersed in what con- 
cerns person or place, cannot see the problem of existence. This 
the intellect always ponders. Nature shows all things formed 
and bound. The intellect pierces the form, overleaps the wall, 
detects intrinsic likeness between remote things, and reduces all 
things into a few principles. 

The making a fact the subject of thought raises it. All that 
mass of mental and moral phenomena which we do not make 
objects of voluntary thought, come within the power of fortune ; 
they constitute the circumstance of daily life ; they are subject 
to change, to fear, and hope. Every man beholds his human 
condition with a degree of melancholy. As a ship aground is 
battered by the waves, so man, imprisoned in mortal life, lies 
open to the mercy of coming events. But a truth, separated 
by the intellect, is no longer a subject of destiny. We behold 
it as a god upraised above care and fear. And so any fact in 
our life, or any record of our fancies or reflections, disentangled 
from the web of our unconsciousness, becomes an object imper- 
sonal and immortal. It is the past restored, but embalmed. A 
better art than that of Egypt has taken fear and corruption out 
of it. It is eviscerated of care. It is offered for science. What 
is addressed to us for contemplation does not threaten us, but 
makes us intellectual beings. 

The growth of the intellect is spontaneous in every expansion. 
The mind that grows could not predict the times, the means, 
the mode of that spontaneity. God enters by a private door into 
every individual. Long prior to the age of reflection is the 
thinking of the mind. Out of darkness, it came insensibly into 
the marvellous light of to-day. In the period of infancy it 
accepted and disposed of all impressions from the surrounding 
creation after its own way. Whatever any mind doth or saith 
is after a law ; and this native law remains over it after it has 
come to reflection or conscious thought. In the most worn, 
pedantic, introverted self-tormenter's life, the greatest part is 
incalculable by him, unforeseen, unimaginable, and must be, until 
he can take himself up by his own ears. What am I ? What 
has my will done to make me that I am ? Nothing. I have 
been floated into this thought, this hour, this connection of 
events, by secret currents of might and mind, and my ingenuity 
and wilfulness have not thwarted, have not aided to an appre- 
ciable degree. 

Our spontaneous action is always the best. You cannot, with 
your best deliberation and heed, come so close to any question 
as your spontaneous glance shall bring you, whilst you rise from 



INTELLECT. 171 

your bed, or walk abroad in the morning after meditating the 
matter before sleep on the previous night. Our thinking is a 
pious reception. Our truth of thought is therefore vitiated as 
much by too violent direction given by our will, as by too great 
negligence. We do not determine what we will think. We 
only open our senses, clear away, as we can, all obstruction from 
the fact, and suffer the intellect to see. We have little control 
over our thoughts. We are the prisoners of ideas. They catch 
us up for moments into their heaven, and so fully engage us, 
that we take no thought for the morrow, gaze like children, 
without an effort to make them our own. By-and-by we fall 
out of that rapture, bethink us where we have been, what we 
have seen, and repeat, as truly as we can, what we have beheld. 
As far as we can recall these ecstasies, we carry away in the 
ineffaceable memorv the result, and all men and all the ages 
confirm it. It is called Truth. But the moment we cease to 
report, and attempt to correct and contrive, it is not truth. 

If we consider what persons have stimulated and profited us. 
we shall perceive the superiority of the spontaneous or intuitive 
principle over the arithmetical or logical. The first contains the 
second, but virtual and latent. We want, in every man, a long 
logic ; we cannot pardon the absence of it, but it must not be 
spoken. Logic is the procession or proportionate unfolding of 
the intuition ; but its virtue is as silent method ; the moment 
it would appear as propositions, and have a separate value, it is 
worthless. 

In every man's mind, some images, words, and facts remain, 
without effort on his part to imprint them, which others forget, 
and afterwards these illustrate to him important laws. All our 
progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud. You have first 
an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has 
root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you 
can render no reason. It is vain to hurry it. By trusting it to 
the end it shall ripen into truth, and you shall know why 
you believe. 

Each mind has its own method. A true man never acquires 
after college rules. What you have aggregated in a natural 
manner surprises and delights when it is produced. Tor we 
cannot oversee each other's secret. And hence the differences 
between men in natural endowment are insignificant in compari- 
son with their common wealth. Do you think the porter and the 
cook have no anecdotes, no experience, no wonders for you? 
Everybody knows as much as the savant. The walls of rude 
minds are scrawled all over with facts, with thoughts. Thev 

I 2 



172 ESSAY XI. 

shall one clay bring a lantern and read the inscriptions. Every 
man, in the degree in which he has wit and culture, finds his 
curiosity inflamed concerning the modes of living and thinking 
of other men, and especially of those classes whose minds have 
not been subdued by the drill of school education. 

This instinctive action never ceases in a healthy mind, but 
becomes richer and more frequent in its informations through all 
states of culture. At last comes the era of reflection, when we 
not only observe, but take pains to observe ; when we of set 
purpose sit down to consider an abstract truth ; when we keep 
the mind's eye open, whilst we converse, whilst we read, whilst 
we act, intent to learn the secret law of some class of facts. 

What is the hardest task in the world ? To think. I would 
put myself in the attitude to look in the eye an abstract truth, 
and I cannot. I blench, and withdraw on this side and on that. 
I seem to know what he meant who said, No man can see God 
face to face and live. For example, a man explores the basis of 
civil government. Let him intend his mind without respite, 
without rest, in one direction. His best heed long time avails 
him nothing. Yet thoughts are flitting before him. We all 
but apprehend, we dimly forebode the truth. We say, I will 
walk abroad, and the truth will take form and clearness to me. 
We go forth, but cannot find it. It seems as if we needed only 
the stillness and composed attitude of the library, to seize the 
thought. But we come in, and are as far from it as at first. 
Then, in a moment, and unannounced, the truth appears. A 
certain, wandering light appears, and is the distinction, the prin- 
ciple we wanted. But the oracle comes, because we had pre- 
viously laid siege to the shrine. It seems as if the law of the 
intellect resembled that law of nature by which we now inspire, 
now expire the breath ; by which the heart now draws in, then 
hurls out the blood, — the law of undulation. So now you must 
labour with your brains, and now you must forbear your activity, 
and see what the great Soul showeth. 

The immortality of man is as legitimately preached from the 
intellections as from the moral volitions. Every intellection is 
mainly prospective. Its present value is its least. Inspect 
w T hat delights you in Plutarch, in Shakspeare, in Cervantes. 
Each truth that a writer acquires is a lantern, which he turns 
full on what facts and thoughts lay already in his mind, and be- 
hold, all the mats and rubbish which had littered his garret be- 
come precious. Every trivial fact in his private biography 
becomes an illustration of this new principle, revisits the day, 
and delights all men by its piquancy and new charm. Men say, 



INTELLECT. 1/3 

Where did he get this ? and think there was something divine 
in his life. But no ; they have myriads of facts just as good, 
would they only get a lamp to ransack their attics withal. 

TTe are all wise. The difference between persons is not in 
wisdom but in art. I knew, in an academical club, a person 
who always deferred to me, who, seeing my whim for writing, 
fancied that my experiences had somewhat superior ; whilst I saw 
that his experiences were as good as mine. Give them to me, 
and I would make the same use of them. He held the old ; he 
holds the new ; I had the habit of tacking together the old and 
the new, which he did not use to exercise. This may hold in 
the great examples. Perhaps if we should meet Shakspeare, we 
should not be conscious of any steep inferiority ; no : but of 
great equality, — only that he possessed a strange skill of usiDg, 
of classifying his facts, which we lacked. For, notwithstanding 
our utter incapacity to produce anything like Hamlet and Othello, 
see the perfect reception this wit, and immense knowledge of 
life, and liquid eloquence find in us all. 

If you gather apples in the sunshine, or make hay, or hoe 
corn, and then retire within doors, and shut your eyes and press 
them with your hand, you shall still see apples hanging in the 
bright light, with boughs and leaves thereto, or the tasselled grass, 
or the corn-flags, and this for five or six hours afterwards. There 
lie the impressions on the retentive organ, though you knew it 
not. So lies the whole series of natural images with wdiich 
your life has made you acquainted in your memory, though you 
know it not, and a thrill of passion flashes light on their dark 
chamber, and the active power seizes instantly the fit image, as 
the word of its momentary thought. 

It is long ere we discover how rich we are. Our history, we 
are sure, is quite tame : we have nothing to write, nothing to 
infer. But our wiser years still run back to the despised recol- 
lections of childhood, and always we are fishing up some won- 
derful article out of that pond ; until, by-and-by, we begin to 
suspect that the biography of the one foolish person we know is, 
in reality, nothing less than the miniature paraphrase of the hun- 
dred volumes of the Universal History. 

In the intellect constructive, which we popularly designate 
by the word Genius, we observe the same balance of two ele- 
ments as in intellect receptive. The constructive intellect pro- 
duces thoughts, sentences, poems, plans, designs, systems. It 
is the generation of the mind, the marriage of thought with 
nature. To genius must always go two gifts, the thought and 
the publication. The first is revelation, always a miracle, which 



174 ESSAY XI. 

no frequency of occurrence or incessant study can ever familia- 
rize, but which must always leave the inquirer stupid with 
wonder. It is the advent of truth into the world, a form of 
thought now, for the first time, bursting into the universe, a 
child of the old eternal soul, a piece of genuine and immeasu- 
rable greatness. It seems, for the time, to inherit all that has 
yet existed, and to dictate to the unborn. It affects every 
thought of man, and goes to fashion every institution. But to 
make it available, it needs a vehicle or art by which it is con- 
veyed to men. To be communicable, it must become picture 
or sensible object. We must learn the language of facts. The 
most wonderful inspirations die with their subject, if he has no 
hand to paint them to the senses. The ray of light passes invi- 
sible through space, and only when it falls on an object is it- 
seen. When the spiritual energy is directed on something out- 
ward, then it is a thought. The relation between it and you 
first makes you, the value of you, apparent to me. The rich, 
inventive genius of the painter must be smothered and lost for 
want of the power of drawing, and in our happy hours we should 
be inexhaustible poets, if once we could break through the 
silence into adequate rhyme. As all men have some access to 
primary truth, so all have some art or power of communication 
in their head, but only in the artist does it descend into the 
hand. There is an inequality, whose laws we do not yet know, 
between two men and between two moments of the same man, 
in respect to this faculty. In common hours, we have the same 
facts as in the uncommon or inspired, but they do not sit for 
their portraits ; they are not detached, but lie in a web. The 
thought of genius is spontaneous ; but the power of picture or 
expression, in the .most enriched and flowing nature, implies a 
mixture of will, a certain control over the spontaneous states, 
without which no production is possible. It is a conversion of 
all nature into the rhetoric of thought, under the eye of judg- 
ment, with a strenuous exercise of choice. And yet the imagi- 
native vocabulary seems to be spontaneous also. It does not 
flow from experience only or mainly, but from a richer source. 
Not by any conscious imitation of particular forms are the grand 
strokes of the painter executed, but by repairing to the fountain- 
head of all forms in his mind. Who is the first drawing-master? 
Without instruction we know very well the ideal of the human 
form. A child knows if an arm or a leg be distorted in a pic- 
ture, if the attitude be natural or grand, or mean, though he 
has never received any instruction in drawing, or heard any con- 
versation on the subject, nor can himself draw with correctness 



INTELLECT. 175 

a single feature. A good form strikes all eyes pleasantly, long 
before they have any science on the subject, and a beautiful 
face sets twenty hearts in palpitation, prior to all consideration 
of the mechanical proportions of the features and head. We 
may owe to dreams some light on the fountain of this skill ; for, 
as soon as we let our will go, and let the unconscious states 
ensue, see what cunning draughtsmen we are ! We entertain our- 
selves with wonderful forms of men, of women, of animals, of 
gardens, of woods, and of monsters, and the mystic pencil 
wherewith we then draw has no awkwardness or inexperience, 
no meagreness or poverty ; it can design well, and group well ; 
its composition is full of art, its colors are well laid on, and the 
whole canvas which it paints is lifelike, and apt to touch us with 
terror, with tenderness, with desire, and with grief. Neither are 
the artist's copies from experience ever mere copies, but always 
touched and softened by tints from this ideal domain. 

The conditions essential to a constructive mind do not appear 
to be so often combined but that a good sentence or verse re- 
mains fresh and memorable for a long time. Yet when we write 
with ease, and come out into the free air of thought, we seem to 
be assured that nothing is easier than to continue this com- 
munication at pleasure. Up, down, around, the kingdom of 
thought has no inclosures, but the Muse make us free of her 
city. Well, the world has a million writers. One would think, 
then, that good thought would be as familiar as air and water, 
and the gifts of each, new hour would exclude the last. Yet we 
can count all our good books ; nay, I remember any beau- 
tiful verse for twenty years. It is true that the discerning intel- 
lect of the world is always much in advance of the creative, so 
that there are many competent judges of the best book, and few 
writers of the best books. But some of the conditions of intel- 
lectual construction are of rare occurrence. The intellect is a 
whole, and demands integrity in every work. This is resisted 
equally by a man's devotion to a single thought, and by his 
ambition to combine too many. 

Truth is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention 
on a single aspect of truth, and apply himself to that alone for 
a long time, the truth becomes distorted and not itself, but 
falsehood; herein resembling the air, which is our natural ele- 
ment, and the breath of our nostrils, but if a stream of the 
same be directed on the body for* a time, it causes cold, fever, 
and even death. How wearisome the grammarian, the phreno- 
logist, the political or religious fanatic, or indeed any possessed 
mortal whose balance is lost bv the exaggeration of a single 



176 ESSAY XI. 

topic. It is incipient insanity. Every thought is a prison also. 
I cannot see what yon see, because I am caught up by a strong 
wind, and blown so far in one direction that I am out of the 
hoop of your horizon. 

Is it any better, if the student, to avoid this offence, and to 
liberalize himself, aims to make a mechanical whole of history, 
or science, or philosophy, by a numerical addition of all the facts 
that fall within his vision ? The world refuses to be analyzed 
by addition and subtraction. When we are young, we spend 
much time and pains in filling our note-books with all definitions 
of Eeligion, Love, Poetry, Politics, Art, in the hope that, in the 
course of a few years, we shall have condensed into our encyclo- 
paedia the net value of all the theories at which the world has 
yet arrived. But year after year our tables get no complete- 
ness, and at last we discover that our curve is a parabola, whose 
arcs will never meet. 

Neither by detachment, neither by aggregation, is the integrity 
of the intellect transmitted to its works, but by a vigilance which 
brings the intellect in its greatness and best state to operate every 
moment. It must have the same wholeness which nature has. 
Although no diligence can rebuild the universe in a model, by 
the best accumulation or disposition of details, yet does the 
world reappear in miniature in every event, so that all the laws 
of nature may be read in the smallest fact. The intellect must 
have the like perfection in its apprehension and in its works. 
Por this reason, an index or mercury of intellectual proficiency 
is the perception of identity. We talk with accomplished per- 
sons who appear to be strangers in nature. The cloud, the tree, 
the turf, the bird, are not theirs, have nothing of them ; the world 
is only their lodging and table. But the poet, whose verses 
are to be spheral and complete, is one whom Nature cannot 
deceive, whatsoever face of strangeness she may put on. He 
feels a strict consanguinity, and detects more likeness than 
variety in all her changes. We are stung by the desire for new 
thought ; but when we receive a new thought, it is only the old 
thought with a new face, and though we make it our own, we 
instantly crave another ; we are not really enriched. Por the 
truth was in us before it was reflected to us from natural objects ; 
and the profound genius will cast the likeness of all creatures 
into every product of his wit. 

But if the constructive powers are rare, and it is given to few 
men to be poets, yet every man is a receiver of this descending 
holy ghost, and may well study the laws of its influx. Exactly 
parallel is the whole rule of intellectual duty to the rule of moral 



INTELLECT. 177 

duty. A self-denial, no less austere than the saint's, is demanded 
of the scholar. He must worship truth, and forego all things 
for that, and choose defeat and pain, so that his treasure in 
thought is thereby augmented. 

God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose. 
Take which you please, — you can never have both. Between 
these, as a pendulum, man oscillates. He in whom the love of 
repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, 
the first political party he meets, — most likely his father's. He 
gets rest, commodity, and reputation ; but he shuts the door of 
truth. He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep 
himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat. He will abstain 
from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, be- 
tween which, as walls, his being is swung. He submits to the 
inconvenience of suspense and imperfect opinion, but he is a 
candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest 
law of his being. 

The circle of the green earth he must measure with his shoes, 
to find the man who can yield him truth. He shall then know 
that there is somewhat more blessed and great in hearing than 
in speaking. Happy is the hearing man ; unhappy the speaking 
man. As long as I hear truth, I am bathed by a beautiful 
element, and am not conscious of any limits to my nature. The 
suggestions are thousandfold that I hear and see. The waters 
of the great deep have ingress and egress to the soul. But if I 
speak, I define, I confine, and am less. When Socrates speaks, 
Lysis and Menexenus are afflicted by no shame that they do not 
speak. They also are good. He likewise defers to them, loves 
them, whilst he speaks. Because a true and natural man con- 
tains and is the same truth which au eloquent man articulates : 
but in the eloquent man, because he can articulate it, it seems 
something the less to reside, and he turns to these silent beautiful 
with the more inclination and respect. The ancient sentence 
said, Let us be silent, for so are the gods. Silence is a solvent 
that destroys personality, and gives us leave to be great and 
universal. Every man's progress is through a succession of 
teachers, each of whom seems at the time to have a superlative 
influence, but it at last gives place to a new. Frankly let him 
accept it all. Jesus says, Leave father, mother, house and lands, 
and follow me. Who leaves all receives more. This is as true 
intellectually as morally. Each new mind we approach seems 
to require an abdication of all our past and present possessions. 
A new doctrine seems, at first, a subversion of all our opinions, 
tastes, and manner of living. Such has Swedenborg, such has 

I 3 



178 ESSAY XI. 

Kant, such has Coleridge, such has Hegel or his interpreter 
Cousin, seemed to many young men in this country. Take 
thankfully and heartily all they can give. Exhaust them, wrestle 
with them, let them not go until their blessing be won ; and, 
after a short season, the dismay will be overpast, the excess of 
influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming 
meteor, but one more bright star shining serenely in your heaven, 
and blending its light with all your day. 

But whilst he gives himself up unreservedly to that which 
draws him, because that is his own, he is to refuse himself to 
that which draws him not, whatsoever fame and authority may 
attend it, because it is not his own. Entire self-reliance belongs 
to the intellect. One soul is a counterpoise of all souls, as a 
capillary column of water is a balance for the sea. It must 
treat things, and books, and sovereign genius, as itself also a 
sovereign. If iEschylus be that man he is taken for, he has not 
yet done his office, when he has educated the learned of Europe 
for a thousand years. He is now to approve himself a master of 
delight to me also. If he cannot do that, all his fame shall avail 
him nothing with me. I were a fool not to sacrifice a thousand 
iEschyluses to my intellectual integrity. Especially take the 
same ground in regard to abstract truth, the science of the mind. 
The Bacon, the Spinoza, the Hume, Schelling, Kant, or whosoever 
propounds to you a philosophy of the mind, is only a more or 
less awkward translator of things in your consciousness, which 
you have also your way of seeing, perhaps of denominating. 
Say, then, instead of too timidly poring into his obscure sense, 
that he has not succeeded in rendering back to you your con- 
sciousness. He has not succeeded ; now let another try. If 
Plato cannot, perhaps Spinoza will. If Spinoza cannot, then 
perhaps Kant. Anyhow, when at last it is done, you will find 
it is no recondite, but a simple, natural, common state, which 
the writer restores to you. 

But let us end these didactics. I will not, though the sub- 
ject might provoke it, speak to the open question between Truth 
and Love. I shall not presume to interfere in the old politics 
of the skies ; — " The cherubim know most ; the seraphim love 
most." The gods shall settle their own quarrels. But I cannot 
recite, even thus rudely, laws of the intellect, without remember- 
ing that lofty and sequestered class of men who have been its 
prophets and oracles, the high-priesthood of the pure reason, the 
Trismegisti, the expounders of the principles of thought from 
age to age. When, at long intervals, we turn over their abstruse 
pages, wonderful seems the calm and grand air of these few, 



INTELLECT. 179 

these great spiritual lords, who have walked in the world, — 
these of the old religion, — dwelling in a worship which makes 
the sanctities of Christianity look parve)iues and popular; for 
" persuasion is in soul, but necessity is in intellect." This band of 
grandees, Hermes, Heraclitus, Empedocles, Plato, Plotinus, Olym- 
piodorus, Proclus, Synesius, and the rest, have somewhat so vast 
in their logic, so primary in their thinking, that it seems antecedent 
to all the ordinary distinctions of rhetoric and literature, and to 
be at once poetry, and music, and dancing, and astronomy, and 
mathematics. 1 am present at the sowing of the seed of the 
world. With a geometry of sunbeams, the soul lays the foun- 
dations of nature. The truth and grandeur of their thought is 
proved by its scope and applicability, for it commands the entire 
schedule and inventory of things for its illustration. But what 
marks its elevation, and has even a comic look to us, is the inno- 
cent serenity with which these babe-like Jupiters sit in their 
clouds, and from age to age prattle to each other, and to no con- 
temporary. Well assured that their speech is intelligible, and 
the most natural thing in the world, they add thesis to thesis, 
without a moment's heed of the universal astonishment of the 
human race below, who do not comprehend their plainest argu- 
ment ; nor do they ever relent so much as to insert a popular or 
explaining sentence; nor testify the least displeasure or petulance 
at the dulness of their amazed auditory. The angels are so 
enamoured of the language that is spoken in heaven, that they 
will not distort their lips with the hissing and unmusical dialects 
of men, but speak their own, whether there be any who under- 
stand it or not. 



ART. 



Give to barrows, trays, and pans 
Grace and glimmer of romance ; 
Bring the moonlight into noon 
Hid in gleaming piles of stone ; 
On the city's paved street 
Plant gardens lined with lilac sweet; 
Let spouting fountains cool the air, 
Singing in the sun-baked square ; 
Let statue, picture, park, and hall, 
Ballad, flag, and festival, 
The past restore, the day adorn, 
And make each morrow a new morn. 
So shall the drudge in dusty frock 
Spy behind the city clock 
Retinues of airy kings, 
Skirts of angels, starry wings, 
His fathers shining in bright fables, 
His children fed at heavenly tables. 
'T is the privilege of Art 
Thus to play its cheerful part, 
Man in Earth to acclimate, 
And bend the exile to his fate, 
And, moulded of one element 
With the days and firmament, 
Teach him on these as stairs to climb, 
And live on even terms with Time ; 
Whilst upper life the slender rill 
Of human sense doth overfill. 






ESSAY XII. 

ART. 



Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, 
but iu every act attempts the production of a new and fairer 
whole. This appears in works both of the useful and the 
fine arts, if we employ the popular 'distinction of works ac- 
cording to their aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine 
arts, not imitation, but creation, is the aim. In landscapes, the 
painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation than we 
know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit, and 
give us only the spirit and splendor. He should know that the 
landscape has beauty for his eye, because it expresses a thought 
which is to him good ; and this, because the same power which 
sees through his eyes is seen in that spectacle; and he will 
come to value the expression of nature, and not nature itself, and 
so exalt in his copy the features that please him. He will give 
the gloom of gloom, and the sunshine of sunshine. In a por- 
trait, he must inscribe the character, and not the features, and 
must esteem the man who sits to him as himself only an imper- 
fect picture or likeness of the aspiring original within. 

TVhat is that abridgment and selection we observe in all 
spiritual activity, but itself the creative impulse ? for it is the 
inlet of that higher illumination which teaches to convey a larger 
sense by simpler symbols. TThat is a man but nature's finer 
success in self- explication? What is a man but a finer and 
compacter landscape than the horizon figures, — nature's eclecti- 
cism? and what is his speech, his love of painting, love of 
nature, but a still finer success ? all the weary miles and tons 
of space and bulk left out, and the spirit or moral of it con- 
tracted into a musical word, or the most cunning stroke of the 
pencil ? 



184 ESSAY XII. 

But the artist must employ the symbols in use in his day 
and nation, to convey his enlarged sense to his fellow-men. 
Thus the new in art is always formed out of the old. The 
Genius of the Hour sets his ineffaceable seal on the work, and 
gives it an inexpressible charm for the imagination. As far as 
the spiritual character of the period overpowers the artist, and 
finds expression in his work, so far it will retain a certain 
grandeur, and will represent to future beholders the Unknown, 
the Inevitable, the Divine. No man can quite exclude this 
element of Necessity from his labour. No man can quite 
emancipate himself from his age and country, or produce a 
model in which the education, the religion, the politics, usages, 
and arts, of his times shall have no share. Though he were 
never so original, never so wilful and fantastic, he cannot wipe 
out of his work every trace of the thoughts amidst which it 
grew. The very avoidance betrays the usage he avoids. Above 
his will, and out of his sight, he is necessitated, by the air 
he breathes, and the idea on which he and his contemporaries 
live and toil, to share the manner of his times, without knowing 
what that manner is. Now that which is inevitable in the work 
has a higher charm than individual talent can ever give, inas- 
much as the artist's pen or chisel seems to have been held and 
guided by a gigantic hand to inscribe a line in the history of 
the human race. This circumstance gives a value to the 
Egyptian hieroglyphics, to the Indian, Chinese, and Mexican 
idols, however gross and shapeless. They denote the height 
of the human soul in that hour, and were not fantastic, but 
sprung from a necessity as deep as the world. Shall I now add, 
that the whole extant product of the plastic arts has herein its 
highest value, as history ; as a stroke drawn in the purtrait of 
that fate, perfect and beautiful, according to whose ordinations 
all beings advance to their beatitude ? 

Thus, historically viewed, it has been the office of art to 
educate the perception of beauty. We are immersed in beauty, 
but our eyes have no clear vision. It needs, by the exhibition 
of single traits, to assist and lead the dormant taste. We carve 
and paint, or we behold what is carved and painted, as students 
of the mystery of Form. The virtue of art lies in detachment, 
in sequestering one object from the embarrassing variety. Until 
one thing comes out from the connection of things, there can be 
enjoyment, contemplation, but no thought. Our happiness and 
unhappiness are unproductive. The infant lies in a pleasing 
trance, but his individual character and his practical power 
depend on his daily progress in the separation of things, and 



ART. 185 

dealing with one at a time. Love and all the passions con- 
centrate all existence around a single form. It is the habit of 
certain minds to give an all-excluding fulness to the object, the 
thought, the word, they alight upon, and to make that for the 
time the deputy of the world. These are the artists, the orators, 
the leaders of society. The power to detach, and to magnify by 
detaching, is the essence of rhetoric in the hands of the orator 
and the poet. This rhetoric, or power to fix the momentary 
eminency of an object, — so remarkable in Burke, in Byron, in 
Carlyle, — the painter and sculptor exhibit in color and in stone. 
The power depends on the depth of the artist's insight of that 
object he contemplates. For every object has its roots in central 
nature, and may of course be so exhibited to us as to represent 
the world. Therefore, each work of genius is the tyrant of the 
hour, and concentrates attention on itself. For the time, it is 
the only thing worth naming to do that, — be it a sonnet, an 
opera, a landscape, a statue, an oration, the plan of a temple, 
of a campaign, or of a voyage of discovery. Presently we pass 
to some other object, which rounds itself into a whole, as did the 
first ; for example, a well-laid garden : and nothing seems worth 
doing but the laying out of gardens. I should think fire the 
best thing in the world, if I were not acquainted with air, and 
water, and earth. For it is the right and property of all natural 
objects, of all genuine talents, of all native properties whatso- 
ever, to be for their moment the top of the world. A squirrel 
leaping from bough to bough, and making the wood but one 
wide tree for his pleasure, fills the eye not less than a lion, — is 
beautiful, self-sufficing, and stands then and there for nature. A 
good ballad draws my ear and heart whilst I listen, as much as 
an epic has done before. A dog, drawn by a master, or a litter 
of pigs, satisfies, and is a reality not less than the frescoes of 
Angelo. From this succession of excellent objects, we learn at 
last the immensity of the world, the opulence of human nature, 
which can run out to infinitude in any direction. But I also 
learn that what astonished and fascinated me in the first work 
astonished me in the second work also ; that excellence of all 
things is one. 

The office of painting and sculpture seems to be merely initial. 
The best pictures can easily tell us their last secret. The best 
pictures are rude draughts of a few of the miraculous dots 
and lines and dyes which make up the ever-changing " land- 
scape with figures' 5 amidst which we dwell. Painting seems to 
be to the eye what dancing is to the limbs. When that has 
educated the frame to self-possession, to nimbleness, to grace, 



186 ESSAY XII. 

the steps of the dancing-master are better forgotten ; so painting 
teaches me the splendor of color and the expression of form, and, 
as I see many pictures and higher genius in the art, I see the 
boundless opulence of the pencil, the indifferency in which the 
artist stands free to choose out of the possible forms. If he can 
draw everything, why draw anything? and then is my eye 
opened to the eternal picture which nature paints in the street 
with moving men and children, beggars, and fine ladies, draped 
in red, and green, and blue, and gray ; long-haired, grizzled, 
white-faced, black- faced, wrinkled, giant, dwarf, expanded, elfish, 
— capped and based by heaven, earth, and sea. 

A gallery of sculpture teaches more austerely the same lesson. 
As picture teaches the coloring, so sculpture the anatomy of form. 
When I have seen fine statues, and afterwards enter a public 
assembly, I understand well what he meant who said, " when 
I have been reading Homer, all men look like giants." I too 
see that painting and sculpture are gymnastics of the eye, its 
training to the niceties and curiosities of its function. There is 
no statue like this living man, with his infinite advantage over 
all ideal sculpture, of perpetual variety. What a gallery of art 
have I here ! No mannerist made these varied groups and 
diverse original single figures. Here is the artist himself im- 
provising, grim and glad, at his block. Now one thought strikes 
him, now another, and with each moment he alters the whole 
air, attitude, and expression of his clay. Away with your non- 
sense of oil and easels, of marble and chisels : except to open 
your eyes to the masteries of eternal art, they are hypocritical 
rubbish. 

The reference of all production at last to an aboriginal Power 
explains the traits common to all works of the highest art, — 
that they are universally intelligible ; that they restore to us the 
simplest states of mind ; and are religious. Since what skill is 
therein shown is the reappearance of the original soul, a jet of 
pure light, it should produce a similar impression to that made 
by natural objects. In happy hours, nature appears to us one 
with art ; art perfected, — the work of genius. And the indi- 
vidual, in whom simple tastes and susceptibility to all the great 
human influences overpower the accidents of a local and special 
culture, is the best critic of art. Though we travel the world 
over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find 
it not. The best of beauty is a finer charm than skill in sur- 
faces, in outlines, or rules of art can ever teach, namely, a radia- 
tion from the work of art of human character, — a wonderful 
expression through stone, or canvas, or musical sound, of the 



ART. 187 

deepest and simplest attributes of our nature, and therefore 
most intelligible at last to those souls which have these attri- 
butes. In the sculptures of the Greeks, in the masonry of the 
Romans, and in the pictures of the Tuscan and Venetian mas- 
ters, the highest charm is the universal language they speak. A 
confession of moral nature, of purity, love, and hope, breathes 
from them all. That which we carry to them, the same we 
bring back more fairly illustrated in the memory. The tra- 
veller who visits the Vatican, and passes from chamber to 
chamber through galleries of statues, vases, sarcophagi, and 
candelabra, through all forms of beauty, cut in the richest mate- 
rials, is in danger of forgetting the simplicity of the principles 
out of which they all sprung, and that they had their origin 
from thoughts and laws in his own breast. He studies the 
technical rules on these wonderful remains, but forgets that 
these works were not always thus constellated ; that they are the 
contributions of many ages and many countries; that each came 
out of the solitary workshop of one artist, who toiled perhaps 
in ignorance of the existence of other sculpture, created his work 
without other model, save life, household life, and the sweet 
and smart of personal relations, of beating hearts, and meeting 
eyes, of poverty, and necessity, and hope, and fear. These 
were his inspirations, and these are the effects he carries home 
to your heart and mind. In proportion to his force, the artist 
will find in his work an outlet for his proper character. He 
must not be in any manner pinched or hindered by his material, 
but through his necessity of imparting himself the adamant will 
be wax in his hands, and will allow an adequate communication 
of himself, in his full stature and proportion. He need not 
cumber himself with a conventional nature and culture, nor ask 
what is the mode in Eome or in Paris, but that house, and 
weather, and manner of living which poverty and the fate of 
birth have made at once so odions and so dear, in the gray, 
unpainted wood cabin, on the corner of a New Hampshire farm, 
or in the log-hut of the backwoods, or in the narrow lodging 
where he has endured the constraints and seeming of a city 
poverty, will serve as well as any other condition as the symbol 
of a thought which pours itself indifferently through all. 

I remember, when in my younger days I had heard of the 
wonders of Italian painting, I fancied the great pictures would 
be great strangers ; some surprising combination of color and 
form ; a foreign wonder, barbaric pearl and gold, like the spon- 
toons and standards of the militia, which play such pranks in 
the eyes and imaginations of school-boys. I was to see and 



188 ESSAY XII. 

acquire I knew not what. When I came at last to Rome, and 
saw with eyes the pictures, I found that genius left to novices 
the gay and fantastic and ostentatious, and itself pierced directly 
to the simple and true ; that it was familiar and sincere ; that it 
was the old, eternal fact I had met already in so many forms, — 
unto which I lived ; that it was the plain you and me I knew so 
well, — had left at home in so many conversations. I had the 
same experience already in a church at Naples. There I saw 
that nothing was changed with me but the place, and said to 
myself, — c Thou foolish child, hast thou come out hither, over 
four thousand miles of salt water, to find that which was perfect 
to thee there at home ?' — that fact I saw again in the Academ- 
mia at Naples, in the chambers of sculpture, and yet again when 
I came to Rome, and to the paintings of Raphael, Angelo, 
Sacchi, Titian, and Leonardo da Yinci. " What, old mole ! 
workest thou in the earth so fast ?" It had travelled by my 
side : that which I fancied I had left in Boston was here in the 
Vatican, and again at Milan, and at Paris, and made all travelling 
ridiculous as a treadmill. I now require this of all pictures, that 
they domesticate me, not that they dazzle me. Pictures must 
not be too picturesque. Nothing astonishes men so much as 
common-sense and plain dealing. All great actions have been 
simple, and all great pictures are. 

The Transfiguration, by Raphael, is an eminent example of 
this peculiar merit. A calm, benignant beauty shines over all 
this picture, and goes directly to the heart. It seems almost to 
call you by name. The sweet and sublime face of Jesus is 
beyond praise, yet how it disappoints all florid expectations ! 
This familiar, simple, home-speaking countenance is as if one 
should meet a friend. The knowledge of pfcture-dealers has its 
value, but listen not to their criticism when your heart is touched 
by genius. It was not painted for them, it was painted for you ; 
for such as had eyes capable of being touched by simplicity and 
lofty emotions. 

Yet when we have said all our fine things about the arts, we 
must end with a frank confession, that the arts, as we know 
them, are but initial. Our best praise is given to what they 
aimed and promised, not to the actual result. He has conceived 
meanly of the resources of man, who believes that the best age 
of production is past. The real value of the Iliad, or the Trans- 
figuration, is as signs of power ; billows or ripples they are of 
the stream of tendency ; tokens of the everlasting effort to pro- 
duce, which even in its worst estate the soul betrays. Art has 
not yet come to its maturity, if it do not put itself abreast with 



ART. 1S9 

the most potent influences of the world, if it is not practical and 
moral, if it do not stand in connection with the conscience, if it 
do not make the poor and uncultivated feel that it addresses 
them with a voice of lofty cheer. There is higher work for Art 
than the arts. They are abortive births of an imperfect or 
vitiated instinct. Art is the need to create ; but in its essence, 
immense and universal, it is impatient of working with lame 
or tied hands, and of making cripples and monsters, such as all 
pictures and statues are. Nothing less than the creation of man 
and nature is its end. A man should hud in it an outlet for his 
whole energy. He may paint and carve only as long as he can 
do that. Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of 
circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same 
sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced 
in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new artists. 

Already history is old enough to witness the old age and dis- 
appearance of particular arts. The art of sculpture is long ago 
perished to any real effect. It was originally a useful art, a 
mode of writing, a savage's record of gratitude or devotion, and 
among a people possessed of a wonderful perception of form this 
childish carving was refined to the utmost splendour of effect. 
But it is the game of a rude and youthful people, and not the 
manly labour of a vise and spiritual nation. Under an oak-tree 
loaded with leaves and nuts, under a sky full of eternal eyes, I 
stand in a thoroughfare ; but in the works of our plastic aits, 
and especially of sculpture, creation is driven into a corner. I 
cannot hide from myself that there is a certain appearance of 
paltriness, as of toys, and the trumpery of a theatre, in sculpture. 
Nature transcends all our moods of thought, and its secret we 
do not yet find. But the gallery stands at the mercy of our 
moods, and there is a moment when it becomes frivolous. I do 
not wonder that Newton, with an attention habitually engaged 
on the paths of planets and suns, should have wondered what 
the Earl of Pembroke found to admire in " stone dolls." Sculp- 
ture may serve to teach the pupil how deep is the secret form, 
how purely the spirit can translate its meanings into that eloquent 
dialect. But the statue will look cold and false before that new 
activity which needs to roll through all things, and is impatient 
of counterfeits, and things not alive. Picture and sculpture are 
the celebrations and festivities of form. But true art is never 
fixed, but always flowing. The sweetest music is not in the 
oratorio, but in the human voice when it speaks from its instant 
life tones of tenderness, truth, or courage. The oratorio has 
already lost its relation to the morning, to the sun, and the 



190 ESSAY XII. 

earth, but that persuading voice is in tune with these. All 
works of art should not be detached, but extempore perform- 
ances. A great man is a new statue in every attitude and action. 
A beautiful woman is a picture which drives all beholders nobly 
mad. Life may be lyric or epic, as well as a poem or a romance. 

A true announcement of the law of creation, if a man were 
found worthy to declare it, would cany art up into the kingdom 
of nature, and destroy its separate and contrasted existence. 
The fountains of invention and beauty in modern society are all 
but dried up. A popular novel, a theatre, or a ball-room makes 
us feel that we are all paupers in the almshouse of this world, 
without dignity, without skill, or industry. Ait is as poor and 
low. The old tragic Necessity, which lowers on the brows even 
of the Yenuses and the Cupids of the antique, and furnishes 
the sole apology for the intrusion of such anomalous figures 
into nature, — namely, that they were inevitable ; that the artist 
was drunk with a passion for form which he could not resist, 
and which vented itself in these fine extravagances, — no longer 
dignifies the chisel or the pencil. But the artist and the con- 
noisseur now seek in art the exhibition of their talent, or an 
asylum from the evils of life. Men are not well pleased with 
the figure they make in their own imaginations, and they flee to 
art, and convey their better sense in an oratorio, a statue, or a 
picture. Art makes the same effort which a sensual prosperity 
makes ; namely, to detach the beautiful from the useful, to do 
up the work as unavoidable, and, hating it, pass on to enjoy- 
ment. These solaces and compensations, this division of beauty 
from use, the laws of nature do not permit. As soon as beauty 
is sought, not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades 
the seeker. High beauty is no longer attainable by him in 
canvas or in stone, in sound, or in lyrical construction; an 
effeminate, prudent, sickly beauty, which is not beauty, is all 
that can be formed ; for the hand can never execute anything 
higher than the character can inspire. 

The art that thus separates is itself first separated. Art must 
not be a superficial talent, but must begin farther back in man. 
Now men do not see nature to be beautiful, and they go to make 
a statue which shall be. They abhor men as tasteless, dull, and 
inconvertible, and console themselves with color-bags, and blocks 
of marble. They reject life as prosaic, and create a death which 
they call poetic. They despatch the day's weary chores, and fly 
to voluptuous reveries. They eat and drink, that they may 
afterwards execute the ideal. Thus is art vilified; the name 
conveys to the mind its secondary and bad senses ; it stands in 



ART. 191 

the imagination as somewhat contrary to nature, and struck 
with death from the first. Would it not be better to begin 
higher up, — to serve the ideal before they eat and drink ; to 
serve the ideal in eating and drinking, in drawing the breath, 
and in the functions of life ? Beauty must come back to the 
useful arts, and the distinction between the fine and the useful 
arts be forgotten. If history were truly told, if life were nobly 
spent, it would be no longer easy or possible to distinguish the 
one from the other. In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It 
is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive ; 
it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty 
will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in 
England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as 
always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave 
and earnest men. It is in vain that we look for genius to reite- 
rate its miracles in the old arts ; it is its instinct to find beauty and 
holiness in new and necessary facts, in the field and road-side, 
in the shop and mill. Proceeding from a religious heart it will 
raise to a divine use the railroad, the insurance office, the joint- 
stock company, our law, our primary assemblies, our commerce, 
the galvanic battery, the electric jar, the prism, and the chemist's 
retort, in which we seek now only an economical use. Is not 
the selfish and even cruel aspect which belongs to our great 
mechanical works, — to mills, railways, and machinery, — the effect 
of the mercenary impulses which these works obey? When 
its errands are noble and adequate, a steamboat bridging the 
Atlantic between Old and New England, and arriving at its 
ports with the punctuality of a planet, is a step of man into 
harmony with nature. The boat at St. Petersburgh, which plies 
along the Lena by magnetism, needs little to make it sublime. 
When science is learned in love, and its powers are wielded by 
love, they will appear the supplements and continuations of the 
material creation. 



THE END. 



Printed by W T oodfall and Kinder, Angel Court, Skinner Street, London. 



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